Agate Scotland

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That may very well be how it all went down that day.

 

However, alternate realities are always available.

 

The devil rides out on the grimly scalloped page. Charcoal-drawn in an unfamiliar hand, as if achieved under anxious direction. As if in somehow sinister translation. The edges of the shells themselves are greened with algae and, as one's itching hay-fevered eye wanders between, a great intricacy is revealed. Every shell is uniquely shattered, and through the various chalky breaks glimpses of hairy crustacean appendages, bristling worm-bellies, vortices and torsades of seaweeds and corresponding tentacles are seen. Even an occasional accusatory goby-eye. Just as your juddering hand had hovered indecisively over that jumbled jotter, on the cusp of an altogether over-eager dismissal, so now the giddy delight that multitudes of undiscovered countries brings, flashes through your grin. A million undisciplined beginnings, wrought through every sensuous line. That is the book that writes us in, to a resplendent Angus in the death throes of Spring.

 

I was thrust into the wild of that devilish sun, hot in the sandstone, a fiery continuum. Underfoot, borne unto the skin of the nape, in hand and underflesh, emboldening bone and flaming sinew, enticing the dreaming eye. 

 

I tumbled from the car, late. Like the white rabbit, though clutching my incredible device rather than a mere pocketwatch. I was late. There were two hours before sunset, and here was a span of bloody earth and fresh green grass that would take me almost a quarter of the way to darkness.

 

Martian soil, Martian spoils. The red worn in the whorls of snails, a rusty shingle-ingot, a flush to every pushing stem, lit in the farmhand's curls, the defiant shore crab claw, in the seagull's itinerant eye, bright in the thorax of a wolf spider, through blood shadows in the complexion of the moon, tainting the light. It wrought fierce ferric visions from every rosy fool that supped from the well, and was firmly bedded in sand and sunset.

 

The devil rides out; forces a hand in the horizon, and sees that red in every swelling, every blemish, in the aching flex of every limb. Late. I was very late.

 

(Perhaps you are familiar with the sweet country pub oblivion, bought with a Sunday roast smile, with creased and ruffled trousers, often while perched on a crow's nest picnic bench in the beer garden, brown hands rifling through a sack of Drum or Old Holborn, the warm yeast thrall of that dim receptacle only a few gentle sea-leg strides away. The reassuring blue swell of sea is dutifully behind, and in July is mistaken for almost domestic, especially when one is under the ale's climate. The church bell sounds one, just as a peal of thunder penetrates the guiness gloom. Soon, the deluge carries the field into the road, the open vauxhall is filled and spoiled and the foreign adidas sailor is willfully adrift in the beery murk. 

 

While I'm still in the sun, and you can see the crow's nest bench from here. A man asleep under the ghostly parasol, seemingly dissolving in the glare, is muttering, and moaning softly, as his terrier squares up to a massive, oafish gull.)

 

In early May, the crop in the field, whether it be corn, barley, hops, is still below knee-height. The ferns have only just completed the uncoiling of their whorls. The bramble tendrils have not quite crossed the oblique path, and the honeysuckle's blissful bouquet is not yet caught in the balmy north-easterlies that whip across the sunburnt nose hovering by, just outside the grasp of the tide. 

 

It's early, and I'm late. I took my partner and her friend to buy lavender and lupins. I concocted a strange freezer dinner, and leapt behind the wheel of the motor. I knew I would have barely an hour before the sun began to set, slow as a melting pudding. The shadows would billow out from under the heady yellow of the gorse and broom, from under the priestly alder, and shoal in-between the cowled wavelets thronging beneath the moon. In the red field margins, the dark spoor of a hare, underneath blue cornflowers full of ladybirds, is missed underfoot. 

 

I'd made it to the bay, the turquoise half-moon of water resplendent in the dusk.

 

I'd already made a great find: a large jasp-agate, red-orange and full of pattern and promise. Later it proved to mainly be filled with haphazard sections of quartz or calcite, a blight on the fine agate running between. Not worth a polish. Of course I was happily unaware of this fact back then, and I was already very much satisfied with my lot that evening, and it was only on the point of leaving that I had seen something else.

 

On the point of leaving after peeing behind a column of sandstone. Upon turning sharply around, I gave myself a fair wallop in the temple against the rough stone. It's always a surprise just how unforgivingly abrasive the old red sandstone is, when drawn against the prone skin of a pale forehead.

 

So I was momentarily engaged in a reverie of pain and dismay.

 

Once I'd shaken that feeling free from my pulsing bones, I saw a stone that, initially appeared much like many others in the area: red, broken and worn deliciously smooth by years of tumbling in the sea, and possibly previous to this in prehistoric rivers. Delicious to the fingers.

 

However, a very particular pattern caught my eye.

 

Peacock feathers is what I see in plumed agate. Peacock feathers and branches of pine when glimpsed reeling below a darkened sky. Regularly I also see throngs of swooning kelp.

 

Peacock feathers: a talisman against evil.

 

Notable too was the uncanny shade of yellow surrounding certain of these evocative structures. It was jarring in its vividity. With yellow, I am always reminded of Robert W. Chamber's novel "The King in Yellow" where this colour is used to signify lunacy, and indefinable cosmic dread. In my case, personally, this yellow provides elation.

 

The plumes of extinct hawaiian birds: the o'ahu 'o'o, and the Hawaii 'i 'o'o in particular. Ornate honeyeaters hunted for their feathers for use in creating elaborate feather-cloaks and headresses worn by the island's nobility.

 

My partner's black feather earrings hidden in a drawer in my bedroom, worn at my 35th birthday party, then never again.

 

The feathery antennae of male moths, particularly the European Emperor Moth, one of the grandest moths to be found in Scotland.

 

Ferns. A world of ferns. Particularly the finest, featherlight varieties often found lurking in bathrooms of my infancy, together with moths when I'd purposefully leave the window open (an extensive nearby copse would dispense huge black-winged denizens on muggy moonless nights, to fill the sink by morning, some duly exhumed from the dark mass of scales would duly barrel through the bedrooms, bronzed, wingless, brazen. Their exposed carapaces like skulls.)

 

So there we are then. Those are my thoughts. 

 

Is this another piece with its secondary source in the old red sandstone conglomerates? Possibly, yes. Though there is a great deal of glacial till in the ground that borders the beach shingle, and there is some reason to think that there may be or may have been an offshore source of agates in the general area. I have seen a single nodule of water-worn quartz crystal with more vaguely plume-like structures, attached to a section of grey andesite. However, this is no reason to think that they are related. There are too many possible origins in this area. It is a veritable wellspring of agate-oddities.

 

Looking at the structure of the piece itself, it is highly complex. This fact I do adore. There is a high degree of agatisation between the plumes, that is to say: there are a large variety of agate textures and fortifications within the plumed composition. Some plumes seem to penetrate several layers of differently coloured and ordained chalcedony. Some fortifications are very fine, and some fine banding exists that is outwith the realms of the reasonably visible. Many of the plumes could be described as being of the "micro" variety, yet in my experience these plumes are more finely and definitely shaped than is usual in such. It is true to say too, that most plumed material in Scotland and elsewhere, consists of pale, weakly banded chalcedony between the aforementioned forms. This piece is not of that ilk. 

 

Perhaps those facts again suggest that it has been eroded and washed downstream from a location long-lost and unseen, from whence no other specimens survive elsewhere. This piece ended-up ensconced in ancient sand and thus was brought to be worn and washed again, this time by the sea.

 

The plumes, in part at least, appear to be metallic, and so perhaps are composed of haematite, at least in certain sections. The yellow colour may be related to goethite.

 Both minerals are often seen together in agates and jasp-agates in this area. There are vugs of quartz crystal also, towards the base of the piece, as well as those that appear to be smoky quartz. Additionally there is blue/grey banded agate surrounding some of the upper portion of the stone, making for a fine contrast with the reds, oranges, browns, blacks and ethereal yellows.

 

So we've digressed, in ridiculous, glorious, disgusting fashion.

 

Shall we go again?