Pebble spotting The hobby we’re all hooked on
… why not try some pebble spotting? Harry Mount enthuses about the new book and hottest hobby of the summer
If you took a trip to the British seaside in the early Fifties, you might have spotted an odd figure trawling through the pebbles on the shore. In 1954, Clarence Ellis was a 65-year-old further education teacher who fought in the First World War. But his real passion was pebbles. That year, he published the accumulated learning from a lifetime of beachcombing in The Pebbles on the Beach, a handbook for newcomers to the art of pebble studies.
The book was a small success then. But, in this scorching record-breaker of a British summer, Ellis’s book has become a runaway bestseller. Rereleased in a new edition this month, the book shot to number three in the non-fiction paperbacks bestseller list in its first week of publication.
And I can see why: I’ve just taken the book to Pembrokeshire, southwest Wales, where I’ve been going on holiday ever since I was a toddler.
I was immediately hooked and, 40 years on, in our hectic, fast-paced age, what could be more exhilarating than wasting the day identifying stones that have taken millions of years to form? Ellis’s elegiac passages speak of an earlier, innocent time, when pebble-fanciers took to the beach with their magnifying glass, and had their finds polished by the seaside “lapidary” or stone-cutter.
Beaches I thought I knew inside out suddenly came alive. In the course of an afternoon, I became an obsessive pebble-spotting convert.
On Freshwater West – a National Trust beach near Pembroke – I was transfixed by pebbles that I would have once considered impossibly dull, suitable only for throwing at cliffs or, if flat enough, for ducks and drakes.
With my trusty Clarence Ellis in hand, I now knew that the first pebble I picked up – a roundish, pinkish, smallish one, about the size of a golf ball – was a “well-rounded pebble of fine-grained, red sandstone”.
Ellis doesn’t just help you identify the pebbles. He tells you where they came from and how they were formed.
All pebbles in Britain are in constant movement around our shores, moved along the beach by windblown waves in so-called “longshore drift”. Others are formed by volcanoes or carried by glaciers. Blocks of a Norwegian rock, larvikite, were transported by North Sea ice sheets to the Yorkshire coast.
Ellis carefully describes the direction of drift along the coasts of England and Wales [he doesn’t deal with Scotland]. Along the south coast, the path is from west to east; along the east coast, it’s from north to south. And, along the west coast, it goes from south to north.
And so, on the west coast of Wales, the drift had taken my little sandstone from south to north. Clarence was spot on. South of my beach there is a patch of sandstone cliff, which had probably
I was transfixed by pebbles I once would have thought dull
produced my pebble after being sliced, diced and battered for millennia by the waves, winds and rain.
My parents’ Pembrokeshire cottage is blessed by being near the meeting point of sandstone and limestone cliffs. And so, a few miles from Freshwater West, I found a grey, speckled, slightly flatter pebble – or, as Ellis describes it, a “flattened, ovoid [egg-shaped] pebble of crystalline limestone”.
This little chunk of grey stone had an impossibly romantic history, “formed from the fragments of skeletons of sea creatures”.
Ellis also tells the moving story of my pebble’s life-cycle: from the vast stretches of Welsh cliff, ground into the stones in my hand, and all the way down to the tiny grains of sand.
Different types of stones crumble at different rates. My little sandstone pebble was a softie compared to, say, basalt, the dark, hard, compact stone made from solidified lava, which you find in hexagonal columns in Fingal’s Cave in the Hebrides.
Waves don’t just take pebbles around the coast. They also magically grade them into different sizes. The best example is at Chesil Beach, Dorset. The pebbles on the 18-mile beach are graded in size to an exceptional degree. Moving south-east, from Bridport to Portland, they get bigger, from pea-sized pellets to stones 6in in diameter.
A much more common grading across Britain, sees the biggest stones being dumped at the top of the beach, and the smallest closest to the sea.
Bigger stones offer a bigger surface for the force of the crashing waves, which push them up the beach.
The “swash” – incoming force – of the waves is also stronger than the “backwash” – the outgoing force. So, once a boulder has been forced up, the backwash is unlikely to pull it back down.
Yet again, thrillingly, Ellis was right. Heading three miles south-east of Freshwater West to Bullslaughter Bay, I found a beautifully graded carpet of pebbles. The huge stones at the top of were impossible to pick up. Down by the sea, I found another sandstone pebble – but this time, a slightly knobbly one, wonderfully veined with a delicate, thin line of white quartz.
I rushed to look at my handbook. Had I stumbled upon a rare gem? Like the 13lb chunk of amber – fossil resin pumped out of pine trees in long-extinct Baltic forests – found on the Suffolk coast in the mid-19th century? That was worth £4,500 then – £500,000 today.
Erm, no, was the answer. Clarence Ellis assured me that what I had found is in fact “abundant”.
Still, the thrill of being able to identify at least some of the billions of pebbles that surround our island was worth a price beyond compare.