Poetics of Pebbles

Poetics of Pebbles: Past

Looking at the photograph above this pebble strikes us as a wonderful object of beauty and power. This resides in the intricacy of the white quartz veins meandering across the pebble and the manner in which they thicken, intermingle, twist and turn, become broader or narrower. The second photograph below is of another pebble that is multicoloured with bands and veins and patches of red across a yellow background.

Both pebbles are also of a different size and shape. Nobody made them but we might say that they are
objects with an inherent beauty of form and perhaps for this very reason more wonderful and fascinating than anything that a human artist might make. This is,of course, a modern response to these pebbles, a modern aesthetic sensibility. How might prehistoric people have thought about these pebbles? Would they also not have thought about them as wonderful in some way - emotionally responded to their forms? We know a number of things from the outset:
1. They constructed ritual monuments and places to bury their dead (cairns) out of pebbles. This was not an easy task because pebbles are smooth and have no edges making them inherently unstable as a building material.
2. Pebbles from the Pebblebed Heathlands have been found way beyond the heathlands themselves to the west on the Haldon Hills and Dartmoor and on Neolithic sites off the heathlands such as High Peak and Hembury.
3. The German term for the Pebblebeds is ‘Bunter’. This is derived from the German word meaning bright. In the Neolithic and Bronze Age world the multicoloured nature of the pebbles would most likely have been quite extraordinary. Today our culture is saturated with artifical colour in the clothes we wear, the books and magazines we read, in film and TV, the cars we drive, the houses we live in and so on. We take colour for granted. In the Bronze Age world the different colours of the pebbles would be quite striking as well as their permanent nature. Other natural colours in this world such as the colours of flowers would come and go with the passing of the seasons. In contrast the multicoloured pebbles were always there in the landscape.

The rainbow serpent is an animal of immense spiritual power and potency to Australian Aboriginal populations. As the name suggests it has a vibrant multicoloured skin. It lives in holes in creeks and comes out or is ‘activated’ when the rain falls and the desert turns green- a time of renewal and plenty. We cannot, of course, make any direct analogy with this. But the suggestion that we can make is that multicoloured objects such as the Pebblebed heathlands themselves, at a macro scale, and individual pebbles within them, at a micro scale, had power and spiritual potency. So building a cairn out of pebbles was a way of tapping into the powers inherent in the land itself and individual pebbles with intricate colours might have been considered to be magical stones which were especially curated. There are other properties of pebbles that can be considered in this light. Pebbles are inconstant in colour. When they are dry they can often appear quite dull and their colours vanish because being exposed to the elements and rolloing actions of sea waves or river currents the outer surface is often bleached a dull white or grey. As anybody who walks along the beach knows the colour in pebbles is activated by water.If it is not raining the most colourful pebbles are those washed by the waves. There is another interesting analogy here with another natural phenomenon. The colours of a rainbow form when the rays of the sun meet falling rain. This is a kind of miracle that activates the sky. Just as pebble colours are inconstant the rainbow eventually fades and is lost in the sky. Water then brings forth the real colours of the pebbles which are otherwise disguised beneath a skin. These ideas of the pebble having a skin, an outside and an inside, and being activated by water, may have also been part of their spiritual power and magical potency. All the pebbles within the Pebblebed heathlands are quartzites. Quartzites are also known as firestones. They produce orange sparks and smell like gunpowder when struck or violently rubbed together- far better and bigger sparks than are produced from flint. In darkness there is an orange flash and even when struck under water they emit a flash. We know from the 2008 Tor Barrow excavations that some of the pebbles might have been used as hammer stones and this might have been not just purely for practical reasons but as part of ceremonies taking place in which flashing light was released from the pebbles. We have seen then that pebbles are associated with water and fire: an elemental opposition. Their colours are activated by water and when struck they produce fire and smell utterly different. A final property of pebbles that is of great important is their tactile properties: the manner in which they are smooth and rounded to touch. The contrast with the coarseness of granite is absolute but they even feel smooth compared with fine grained sandstones or chalk. Quartzites are sandstones cemented together with silica which are incredibly hard and dense. The pebbles when struck and broken tend to shatter and break in all directions producing surfaces which are both shiny and feel greasy to touch: an important tactile property that, like colour, remains hidden within the pebble. Pebbles, because of their form, seem to almost naturally lend themselves to sorting activities in terms of colour or shape or form or a combination of all of these. They invite one to create patterns out of them. The project aims to investigate, following in the footsteps of George Carter (see George Carter page) the manner in which pebbles were being sorted and patterned in a prehistoric context but also in the present (see below).

For all these reasons we believe that the pebbles were magical stones and the Pebblebed heathlands
Was, and is, a magical landscape.
The Pebblebeds Project will investigate these and other ideas about the past poetics of pebbles by:
• Recording the colours of pebbles both in pebble cairns and in areas of the landscape without any monuments to investigate whether particular colours or types of pebbles are being differentially selected to build monuments.
• We are collecting ‘special’ pebbles by metre square and pebble layer at Tor barrow and elsewhere in order to investigate whether individual multicoloured pebbles were being selected or those with intricate quartz veins etc.
• We aim to explore what these special pebbles may have signified. We have already noted that the patterns of quartz veins on some pebbles may resemble eyes or human bodies or even animals or birds.They bear a suggestive resemblance to things in the world acting as material metaphors. On some the appearance is analogous to sinews and binding. The shapes and surface textures of some irregular pebbles remind one of internal body organs: brains, kidneys, livers etc.
• Looking for and recording any evidence of patterning being created out of pebbles whether in terms of colour or form: e.g. the creation of geometric forms or other shapes.

Pebble Pavement, East Budleigh

Church Wall, Colaton Raleigh

Everywhere in the villages on and in the immediate surroundings of the Pebblebed heathlands we encounter examples of vernacular architecture in which pebbles are used: as decorative patterning on the faces of garden walls and buildings, as flooring material in courtyards, paths and barns. Sadly this is disappearing fast because the walls are sometimes crumbling and the pebbles are not replaced. Pebbles are tricky to walk on and often get tarmaced or cemented over. For example, there are few pebble constructions left in Newton Poppleford today despite the fact that the village is named after its popples (pebbles) and the elaborate fan-shaped pebble patterns which once formed the floor of Woodbury church amd elsewhere have long since been covered over.
• The project aims to produce an archive of the variety of this distinctive part of the East Devon cultural
Heritage though photographing and documenting pebble structures throughout the area.
In the present, as was most likely in the prehistoric past, many people find pebbles fascinating: building with them on the beach, making them skate on the surface of the waves, finding those with unusual forms. This appears to be an age-old preoccupation. As part of the project we want to develop our own responses to the pebbles in the context of our excavations and analysis and to encourage those of others by:
• Constructing installation artworks out of pebbles paying attention to their sensuous tactile qualities,
colours and forms as discussed above
• Photograph and display the pebbles in imaginative ways
• Invite artists to develop their responses using these and other ideas