Have you ever really thought about a certain walk that you’ve taken regularly or perhaps even your whole life? There must be a walk that seems very familiar to you, but when you think about it, do you really know anything about it at all?
Francis Gooding’s routine, half-mile clifftop walk along the Gower Peninsula, near Swansea, has culminated in this fantastic piece of work. The Script Of The Stones transforms a modest walk enjoyed by thousands over the years into a sweeping, multi-dimensional voyage across time and human history.
The narrative expertly sets the tiniest elements of nature – from fragile banded snails and local plant life to ancient limestone laid down 350 million years ago – against the heavy, overlapping shadows of the human past. Caves holding prehistoric mammoth bones sit starkly beside the darker, tangled roots of modern ecological damage.
It weaves the scientific accuracy of geological history with the raw, intimate vulnerability of personal experience. The pacing of the book follows the steady, deliberate cadence of a wanderer who has chosen to finally stop and look down. Gooding forces the reader to confront how climate change destabilises our historical relationship with the natural world largely avoiding romanticism, choosing instead brutal honesty and scientific fact. Part environmental elegy and part intimate love letter to a single patch of south-west Wales, The Script Of The Stones challenges us to rethink what it costs to truly pay attention to the spaces we inhabit whilst indulging in Gooding’s deep affinity to this part of the world.
