A visit from Beatrice Searle

We were recently lucky to welcome the remarkable artist, stonemason, and writer Beatrice Searle to our workshop. You may know her from The Stone Will Answer, her acclaimed memoir about walking a standing stone from Orkney to Norway along an ancient pilgrimage route. The dedication and imagination behind such a journey capture Beatrice’s gentle defiance of limits and conventions.

Given our motto, ‘always out of the ordinary’, it felt right to have Beatrice with us, setting an example for our team. I first met Beatrice several years ago during a radio programme: I was speaking about my tenure as Stamford’s poet laureate, and Bea spoke about her upcoming journey. We hit it off on air and hatched a plan to give Stamford its own poetry stone, with the words I'd written carved by Beatrice. I should mention that none of this would have come to fruition without Karen Burrows, the arts programmer from Stamford Arts Centre

To protect the stone from the elements, Beatrice deepened the original inscriptions, and in doing so created a palimpsest that adds an extra narrative and intrigue to the stone. One face reads ‘step up and speak’, the other, ‘we are all poets’. On top are the footprints of Stamford’s first poet laureate, Darren Rawnsley. The local poetry community were thrilled to see the stone receive the care it deserved, and it was re-inaugurated this April on Shakespeare’s birthday. 

Camilla McLean