Hag Stones

 

We just had a family weekend in Norfolk.

 

On the beach were a huge number of flints, rolled and tumbled by the tide, some smoothed into spheres, others fractured to reveal their ochre hearts. It was flints like this which influenced sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

 

My friend Carol collects flints with holes running through them - she threads them on twine and hangs them from her fence. These perforated stones were once considered magical. Said to ward off witches, they were called hag stones.

That day in Norfolk, I asked my family to comb the beach for very tiny hag stones – hag pebbles.

A long time ago when Pascoe was little and the twins mere toddlers we were all together, wrapped up against the cold wind, paddling on the beach below Kilimantringen

 

Lighthouse in Galloway, when Nigel handed me just such a pebble. Ever since, it has been my key fob.

 

Twenty-six years, however, have worn the hole broad and the stone thin, and someday soon it will wear through. Before that happens, I would like to have its successor lined up, and if possible, I would like it also to have been gleaned on a day when we were all together once more. 

Lucky then that we found one – another precious memory I can turn over in my pocket through the years ahead.

 

(Thank you so much, Andrew and Liz, for lending us your barn).