Fascinated with the mysterious footprint stones of Northern Europe and the ancient Greco-Roman world, stones closely associated with travellers, saints and the inauguration of Kings, she follows in their footsteps as her stone becomes a talisman, a bedrock and an offering to those she meets along the way.

I was quickly taken in by Beatrice Searle's distinctive voice, and by the end I couldn't help but feel very differently about stones, rootedness, belonging, and indeed what walking might mean. Madness fuelled by self-discovery, a deep and driving inner need and the light of creativity, art and inspiration. This unusual book tells the story of the author Beatrice Searle’s journey from Orkney across the North Sea and then for 500 miles on a medieval pilgrim path through southern Norway to Nidaros cathedral, dragging along with her a 40 kilo stone quarried on the West coast of Orkney. Storied impressions and whom we feel compelled to wield in the titanic efforts of believing in being human. Why would a slight young Welsh woman want to drag her own bodyweight of Scottish rock and metal for hundreds of miles across the Norwegian countryside?

And in spring 2017, she strapped herself into her custom-designed harness and began pulling her stone along the first leg of the recently opened St Magnus Way pilgrim route. She will follow the old pilgrimage paths to Trondheim with her stone, inviting people to stand in it along the way and discover for themselves a place of anchorage and strength. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t for such reasons that the characters attracted to stone are as uncompromising and hard to define as it is — read Fred Bower’s Rolling Stonemason (1936) or Seamus Murphy’s Stone Mad (1949), two of the foundational works of literary stonemasonry, and you’ll see what I mean.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Searle is as much artist-adventurer as she is stonemason and it is the journey she undertakes from Orkney to Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway, that forms the basis of the book. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.