The Offering

At dusk I walked down Chapel Street to the sea. The granite slabs were wet and sparkled with giant white feldspar crystals that under the five o’clock streetlights looked like day-old confetti. I cut through the churchyard where the palms were jumping in the breeze, their black leaves glossy in the dying light. High tide and waves were breaking over the road drawing huge crests of spray that lingered in the berserk air like the outline of some ancient creature’s skeleton. I leant into the wind and tried to avoid these heavy falls of sea-rain, crossing the road as the traffic allowed to make the most of the shelter afforded by buildings and bus stops. The noise was terrific, the waves drowning out the sounds of engines and shaking the ground with a depth-charge-like thump as they hit the sea wall, each time making my heart leap. I folded the collars of my coat up around my ears for a feeble amount of extra protection and felt in my pocket for the stone that I’d brought with me. It had fallen through the hole I kept forgetting to mend and was now banging against my knee in the lining. Today, perhaps, was not the day for the beach.

But I carried on. The seafront was wider the closer you got to Newlyn so it might be possible to stand before the waves there without getting soaked by them, even in a strong wind. The road seemed narrow as rush hour vehicles sped by, demanding concentration to not accidentally stumble on a kerb or a drain cover, especially when other people walked past. When I could finally make it beyond the long section of resurfacing works and cross back to the prom it was a relief to be out of the glare of headlights. I would take my chances with the intermittent spray. I sat on a bench in the cover of a shelter before the next serious shower, well protected from both the wind and the water, and tried to work the stone out of my coat.

I’d brought a particular one with me. It was a flint pebble, about the size of my palm and mottled cream and grey and brown. There was a pleasing circularity to it broken only by a pointed corner that poked out like the remnant of a stumpy tail. The main feature however and the reason I’d picked it up in the first place was that it had a hole all the way through it, set slightly off-centre. The hole was about a centimetre in diameter and entirely natural, a product of the strange geology of the southeast from which it had come and no doubt augmented by the actions of the waves. I had found it on the beach in Bexhill, the town in which I’d grown up, and had painted the sides of the hole with some antique gold acrylic paint, I wasn’t sure why, but it did look better: the light that travelled through the centre seemed energised somehow.

This stone was here to do a particular job. I’d brought it here to Penzance to start something. I didn’t know quite what. A dialogue with the elements of some kind? A request to the invisible? I had a vague intention of trying to cut through the fog that lingered in my brain. I hoped that the coast and those who had walked here before me might have something to offer, that I could learn from if I could access it, and here my holed stone or hagstone (or adder stone, or witch stone, depending on which part of the southeast you hailed from) might act as a pivot. Hagstones had a long history of occupying liminal places and indeed a long history of negotiating with spirits. Principally these spirits were of the unfriendly kind and needed to be repelled and kept away, which a hagstone did better than anything—or so the folklore said. But what if those spirits had something to offer me, some answers? What if they didn’t want to be repelled? As I wrested the stone back into my hand I wondered about the sanity of my undertaking.

The hagstone, then, was a bridge, a means of communication between different realities. My plan was to place it before the waves on different beaches on the south coast, the hope being that through this repeated symbolic gesture or offering new knowledge might come my way. I wanted to connect with the overlooked and unacknowledged and my stone might enable this, I thought, by providing a thread to the coasts within and a link to the waves of memory and imagination that, like a pebble perpetually being worn smooth, continually shaped and reshaped us. The stone would be my foothold for the formless.

I threw the stone after a retreating wave. The next incoming one claimed it and for a moment it disappeared entirely, only to emerge from the surf seconds later wrapped in a wide green strand of weed. I jumped on it, picked it up and ran out of the grumbling shallows, back over the black pebbles spotted with standout granites, quartz and green serpentinites. It seemed like the sea had welcomed my undertaking in some way and I felt a surge of joy at the prospect. There was a fixed starting point that could be traced, plotted, mapped, in time as well as place, to the beach at Penzance, Cornwall, winter 2019. The work had begun.