Years ago, on a second holiday in St Cast le Guildo, Brittany, my curiosity got the better of me. I could no longer resist the pull of an information sign which directed me towards the 'pierres sonnantes' ('singing stones) on the river bank. It turns out that this collection of boulders sitting on the river bank failed to live up to their legend. Tapping a stone on their mossy surface produced not the promised song, but a dull and uninteresting 'clack'.
Benjamin Myers, on the other hand, has made his rock sing. The book's 350 pages are what could best be described as a lyrical encounter with Scout Rock in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire. In the author's company we scramble up through bracken and undergrowth, we fall headlong onto yesterday's rubbish in the tip, and we gaze out at the darkening landscape from a shelf on the rock. The rock is at once brooding presence, cipher, landmark and home. If it is true that the author makes it sing, what is less certain is the genre of the music. Is it the warm jazz of a summer's evening, the strident violin scratching down a sky of steel, or a half-remembered spiritual? Each reader will have to decide, and each reader will doubtless hear it differently. As a person with an interest in the journey walked, this line will be a recurring refrain for me, I think:
Walking is writing with your feet.Nature books can be twee. Poetry books can be self-indulgent. Autobiographies of a 'move to the country' can shut the reader out at least as much as they let them in. This book defies all those descriptions, and whatever it is called - it made the rock sing.
