Tony (a stone-mason, who is also my partner and the father of our little girl) gave Madeleine an unusual Christmas present a couple of years ago. Here’s what happened, as described in the final chapter of The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes:
“Tony was wearing a headband with two tinsel stars shimmering on wobbly stalks, and he stood by the sandstone mounting block, against which a shiny but indeterminate object was propped. As Madeleine approached he swept aside the foil sack to reveal a stone cross about two feet high: unmistakeably a gravestone.
‘Oh!’ She stopped, fearful, and looked at Ruth, but Ruth was smiling. ‘It’s okay, he doesn’t know a thing,’ she whispered, then said aloud, ‘You have to come and read what he’s written on it.’ The stone was dark Blencathra slate, polished so that it gleamed in the grey light of late afternoon. At the centre of the cross, Tony had engraved the name ‘Bob’.
‘I thought it’d look better than that old lump of sandstone,’ he said. ‘And I gather the old dog was a bit of a favourite. I’ll take it across to the grave and put it up for you tomorrow.’
Madeleine ran her finger across the letters, feeling their clean sharp edges. She began to laugh. She laughed so hard that tears streamed from her eyes and she had to hold onto Tony’s shoulder. He stared at her, bewildered, and she gripped him tightly so that he winced. ‘It’s the best present you could have given me. If you knew how I hated that stinking little dog … May he now rest in peace!’ “
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Tony’s been working over in Keswick recently, restoring some slate carvings. Sometimes I take Alison across to see what he is doing (Alison is nearly 2 years old now – we called her Alison Madeleine), and once we went with him to St Bees’ church when he was renovating part of a red sandstone window-frame. He likes to tell us stories about the stone he’s working with, and I suddenly had the idea that I’d get him to do a guest blog. But he made me promise not to edit it …
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Tony’s guest blog: Writing in stone
When the summer comes, and the livin’ is easy, I’m going to take Ruth and Alison to Millican Dalton’s Cave in Borrowdale. It’s a bit steep and slippy getting up to the Cave Hotel (that’s what Millican called it), which is on the River Derwent side, I guess that’s the east side, of Castle Crag in the Jaws of Borrowdale (good name, ‘Jaws’ – the hillsides squeeze in just there and try to crunch the Crag).
The slate spoil-heap, Castle Crag
Castle Crag’s all slate. If you go up the standard way on the other side you zig-zag up a spoil heap, and the loose slate makes tinkly sounds with each step. Then you get to a couple of quarries, and people have propped up sheets of slate so it looks like a sort of sculpture-garden, really dramatic. People have scratched their names on the quarry walls, too. At the top of the Crag is an engraved memorial to the War Dead, and on top of that, at the very top, is a circular wind-shelter of piled-up slate. A good place to have your sarnies and a can or two!
'Sculpture park' on Castle Crag
Further down the hill again there’s a seat and more engraved slate, about the woman who gave Castle Crag to the nation (that’s us, folks) in memory of her husband.
Anyway, Millican Dalton – he was a real eccentric, I wish I’d met him but he died in 1947. He called himself the Professor of Adventure, and he offered to take folks (especially good-looking women – though apparently he smelt a bit because he didn’t have a bathroom in his hotel, so maybe the women were not too keen) on walks and climbs and rafting trips. He lived in his so-called Cave Hotel, which has two ‘rooms’, in the summers – and the reason I’m blogging about him is because on the wall of the lower cave he’s engraved “DON’T !! WASTE WORRDS. Jump to Conclusion”. The letters are well-cut, the walls are slate and take the letters well. It’s said that a Scottish friend of his cut the bit that’s in capitals and then old Millican added the extra R as a joke on his friend’s accent.
There are other slate quarries in the Jaws too – and all the slate is what’s called Lakeland Green. Jaws’ slate is used for building and walling, not like Honister slate which was quarried for roofing (and now it’s used for all kinds of engraved stuff for tourists).
I was working at St Kentigern’s church near Keswick one time and had a wander round the graveyard (as one does) and I noticed that the gravestones suddenly changed in about 1850 – suddenly Lakeland Green was all the rage, absolutely the stone to be buried in. I happened to ask my old tutor about this and he said it was probably because new sawing and planing tools were developed about that time, somewhere up in Scotland, so it was easier and faster to cut the sides. Makes sense, I guess. If you want sharp, clear, instantly-readable letters and words – slate’s the best stone for that. I get quite a few commissions for memorials and plaques in slate.
But if you like subtlety, you need to go for sandstone, either beestone or Lazonby Red.
Beestone comes from St Bees’, as you’d guess: quarries at Sandwith and Egremont, for example. Lazonby Red’s from the Penrith area, it’s completely different.
View through Lacy's Caves, Little Salkeld
We took Alison to Lacy’s Caves last summer, though she was far too wee to care. The caves are at Little Salkeld, high above the river. Ruth hadn’t been there before and was well impressed. Now that is beautiful sandstone, you can see how the river has scoured it, and where there are bands of resistant harder rock. Colonel Lacy had the five caves quarried out of the rock back 18th century, as some sort of folly. And people have scratched their names on the walls ever since — but you need to take time to make a good impression if you’re carving sandstone.
Entrance to Lacy's Caves
Ruthie and the babe came to St Bees’ with me one time and we walked across the cliffs to Fleswick Bay – red sandstone everywhere, the drystone walls in the fields, houses, the church, even the mole-hills are red.
Beestone is amazing stuff – it sparkles, because of the mica flakes. Penrith sandstone doesn’t have any mica – it was laid down by the wind in desert dunes. Beestone was laid down in water, like sand-banks in rivers.
When you carve beestone, it looks pale because of the dust, but then you wash it and the warmth and the hidden grain suddenly come through. Being sandstone, it’s really abrasive on tools. Think sandpaper! When I’m carving, I first use the files and then I take any discarded flake or whatever of sandstone, and use it to sand the surface smooth. For the fine sanding I use wet and dry paper, and then I wash and polish the piece. Finally I rub in a bit of oil. Beestone’s quite silky, and gives a really crisp image, so you get the maximum sculptural effect. With sandstone the light doesn’t reflect so you don’t get any distortion of what you see. And that’s important when I’m sculpting a gargoyle, say, or renovating detail round a window.
The red sandstone cliffs at Fleswick Bay
Anyway, Fleswick Bay. It’s all Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, all big rounded shapes and contours. Ruth loved it. The sandstone platform by the sea is scooped out and hollowed, and there are all sizes of rounded sandstone pebbles, on the beach and caught in the hollows. Norman Nicholson must have been to Fleswick Bay, because he wrote about St Bees’ sandstone (I just looked up the poem so I could copy it here):
“Smooth as a walnut turned on a lathe,
Or hollowed in clefts and collars where the pebbles
Shake up and down like marbles in a bottle.
Here the chiselling edges of the waves
Scoop long fluted grooves, and here the spray
Pits and pocks the blocks like rain on snow.”
The other thing you need to do at Fleswick is spend time walking at the foot of the cliffs and looking for engraved names. ‘Kells’ is written everywhere – families from Kells, just along the cliff, probably all coal-miners’ families coming to the beach for their summer hols. The oldest name that we found was “M.I. 1774”, almost hidden by green slime. And the best is ‘Judy McKay‘ — there’s no date but her lettering is perfectly finished, deeply incised, all with serifs. It’s a careful script that isn’t much used today, and the ‘c’ in McKay is done in superscript — beautiful.
She’s still alive, by the way – you can read her story on the website called Solway Shore Stories. It was her father who engraved her name, he was a stone-mason.
That’s what I’d like to do, too. One day I’ll take Ali down to Fleswick and she can play on the beach while I engrave her name. Alison Lucini.
(poem extract is from St Bees in The Pot Geranium; Norman Nicholson: Collected Poems, edited by Neil Curry; Faber 1994)
