Description

The Script of the Stones follows a single half-mile clifftop walk on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales – one the author has been making his whole life. It takes fifteen minutes, if you keep moving. But one day Francis Gooding decides to stop and look down. What unfolds is a rare act of attention: to limestone laid down in tropical seas 350 million years ago, to the orchids and gorse and banded snails that have claimed the cliff for their own, to the rocks and caves that hold the bones of mammoths, bears and one ochre-stained man who slept here for thirty thousand years. But the cliff also holds something else: the deep, tangled roots of human history – imperial violence, ecological destruction – rising through the red earth like the old mole Shakespeare knew, unstoppable, asking to be acknowledged.

A book about grief and deep time, about what it means to belong to a place and what it costs to pay attention, The Script of the Stones is nature writing of a rare and searching kind. An elegy, a field guide, a ghost story – and underneath it all, a love letter to one small patch of the world.

Publisher Review

The Script of the Stones is at once a deep excavation of the difficult histories bound up in human writing about nature, and a call to attend to what languages and texts may be held within the changing layers and surfaces of the Earth itself. I loved this book for its deliberate stickiness, its openness to mystery and strangeness, its commitment to taking unmarked paths – from which, inevitably, emerge moments of great insight, and exhilarating, mind-altering new truths. — Helen Jukes, author of ‘Mother Animal’ Like any harmonious cosmology, The Script of the Stones is an expert and encyclopaedic balancing of microcosm and macrocosm. By bedding down in locality it compellingly spirals outward, attuned to the many voices – animal, mineral, vegetal – that speak through the minutiae of place and matter. Francis Gooding is a generous intercessor and guide across these scales and frequencies, and his prose is as receptive to the powder-fine dust of language as to that of the natural world around us. — Daisy Lafarge, award-winning poet and author of ‘Paul’ The only way to work with hyperobjects is to live them. You can find them in rockpools. In this wonderful book, Francis Gooding shows how lived experience differs wildly from the command-control theories of subjective mastery that have plagued the planet. Like fingers palpating a shell, Gooding’s sensual prose traverses haunting densities of time and space. — Timothy Morton, author of ‘Hyperobjects’ and ‘Hell’ The Script of the Stones is a remarkable book; a kaleidoscopic meditation on the microcosm, and life in all its immensity. Within a small patch of land unfold enormities of space and time, and myriad ways of being – rock, slug, fish, cow, plant, fowl. Lyrical and informed, enraptured and, at times, enraged, it envelops us with a measured transcendence and hums with quiet psychedelic intensity. — Mark Pilkington