The Script of the Stones

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.