The Geologist’s wife loved the feelof warm stone on her bare skin,the sense of melting into bedrock, becomingpart of a landscape where she strokesthe bell-shaped buds of heath heatherwith her fingertips, releasesthe smell of honey. That year before the war they walked togetherup the valley… Read more
The Geologist delighted in finding quarries.Tears and slices of landscape;fine sections of tuffs and lavas, The jagged crags of resistant rock.The impressive ridge of the Stiperstones. Old rocks, like the marbles and schistsIn the drowned fault valleyof the Dardanelles –The Hellespont, swumby the lovelorn Leanderuntil… Read more
I was often fortunate in interesting some intelligent member of the peasant-classin my work (Georgina Jackson, The Shropshire word book) It’s 1916. Her father’s dead from Spanish flu.She tells the geologist stories.How Gwendol Wrekin ap Shenkin ap MynyddmawrGwendol Wrekin, son of Shenkin, grandson of Big… Read more
The War Office called for a water-diviner at Gallipoli – Çanakkale Savaşı. Instead, four geologists disembarked, ready to find water, each marked by a sunburned patch on the back of their neck. A diviner was wanted, not geologists No-one had yet surveyed the land below… Read more