Witnessing the removal of the Stone of Scone from Edinburgh Castle for the coronation of King Charles III, and the clear acute embarrassment of everyone involved with the ceremony of slowly processing a lump of sandstone from one location to another, made me think of a treatise I’d written during a period of convalescence whilst recovering from myxomatosis back in 2007. Below I have reproduced the treatise in full.
They say that a rolling stone gathers no moss, and certainly there is no record of Mick Jagger doing so, though Keith Richards once, after a particularly vivid acid trip, mistakenly boiled four kilos of lichen for several hours thinking he was Madame Cholet.
What is undeniable is the importance rocks have played in shaping our species’ history, a fact recognised when palaeontologists renamed the ‘Questionable Dental Hygiene Age’ as the ‘Stone Age’ and went around the country scribbling it into school textbooks.
Having used a meteorite to evict the previous tenants for breaking Gondwana, the Earth decided to give the apes a chance, and they welcomed the opportunity by starting to bang the rocks together.
The stone that killed Goliath is generally recognised as the first ‘stone’. Before it, the consensus in the world of academia is that everything was just slightly spongy.
Stonehenge, the most famous henge in the world has been around for an awfully long time too, though no longer fulfils its original function. The word ‘henge’ is of course a portmanteau form of the root term ‘hen-cage’, and such this World Heritage Site was. Chickens in the late Neolithic era, some 2,500 years ago, were ten feet tall, descended as they were from velociraptors, and it took almost six centuries of selective domestic breeding to get them down to a size where you could feed them without having to wear armour. The downsides were that Stonehenge could no longer function as a ‘hen-cage’ with the gaps between sarsens being too large to contain the smaller birds, and that one egg couldn’t provide a whole village with an omelette anymore.
The Stone of Scone, the ancient rock used in the coronation of Scottish monarchs for fifteen hundred years, is a curious oblong of red sandstone. Known by many as the Stone of Destiny, in Scottish Gaelic as clach-na-cinneamhain, and Klingon as nagh bogh cha’DIch, the stone has its origins in Ireland where it was used as a paperweight by St. Patrick to organise his anti-snake diatribes. Such propaganda included his slogans ‘Keep Ireland snake-free!’, ‘Allow snakes into Ireland? No fangs you!’ and the controversial ‘Snakes cost the NHS over £350 million a year’ which he had plastered in six feet tall letters onto the side of ox-wagons. It was stolen by King Fergus Mór of Dái Riada and given to his son as a form of proto-duplo. Eventually the stone became synonymous with the ruling house in Scotland and later England (once it was stolen by Edward I or ‘longshanks’ to his mates, tailor and mistress), and many a historical buttock has perched on it since, right up until Elizabeth II herself.
The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, but created in 196BC, is well-known for becoming the key to translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and also for providing us with a two thousand year old recipe for onion soup (a codicil insisted upon by Ptolemy V Epiphanes who swore by his aunt’s version whenever he had a fever). The name ‘Rosetta Stone’ was given to the ancient ganodiorite-etched decree after an overenthusiastic research assistant, a Miss Rosalind Bifurcated, mistook the rock for liquorice and gnawed her way through the upper left portion before she could be hauled off by three of her associates.
The rock associated with the Arthurian legend of ‘the sword in the stone’ is of course fictitious, but has its roots in a lump of granite found in a village in Cornwall. According to local stories, a careless coxswain during the reign of King Mark of Kernow (Cornwall) in the sixth century, tripped whilst delivering a fish skillet to an ombudsman and got the handle irretrievably wedged in a crack in the granite. Although, unlike the Arthurian take on it where pulling the ironmongery from the stone was your ticket to the English throne, getting the skillet out of the rock earned a passing novice monk the right to lower his lobster pots off The Lizard and put the jam and cream on his scone in whatever order he pleased without being stoned in the market square.
Another rock steeped in Celtic legend is of course the Blarney Stone – imaginatively named after its location in Blarney Castle, Blarney. Famously, kissing the stone gives you the ‘gift of the gab’, though attempting to French kiss it gives you awkward friction burns on your tongue and a dose of sedimentary herpes. The stone itself is a carboniferous limestone with several myths attached to its origins. The one that most scholars seem to favour is that it was one of the stones used to build the Tower of Babel – hence its ability to improve people’s language skills – and was gifted to Cormac MacCarthy by Robert the Bruce’s mother Marjory for, as she put it, ‘putting up with the wee bairn and not kicking him in the knackers during the Battle of Bannockburn’.
Plymouth Rock is a type of guitar-based music favoured by sailors. It also happens to be the name of a rock found in Plymouth Massachusetts – a location famed in the US as the site of one of the greatest coincidences in history as the place the Pilgrims had set off from was also called Plymouth.
“We couldn’t believe it,”*1 said John Carver, Pilgrim and first governor of Plymouth. “We’d come all that way only to land at another bloody Plymouth! How we laughed! Bradders (pilgrim, William Bradford) had an accident he laughed that hard.” This unfortunate habit of laughing at rocks instead of establishing a sanitary settlement and consistent food source, was what led to over half of the initial settlers dying off in the first year.
Primal Scream frontman, Bobby Gillespie’s frustration that people had taken to placing stones over the top of their jars of honey is well known – a fad prompted by Keith Floyd’s drunken assertion that it improved the flavour and it’s what the Celts did:
“Looking this way, Clive, good, there we go, in with the langoustine, excellent, sizzling away there in the cognac, and now back to me, Clive, just a quick slurp of this, that’s better, and of course, the Celts used to place basalt over their honey pots to keep out Belenos the Sun-God and as they knew it enriched the flavour.” (‘Floyd on Meth’ – BBC ’84).
Gillespie’s heartfelt plea of ‘get your rocks off, get your rocks off honey’ became the mantra of an anti-Floyd movement further stoked by Delia Smith’s assertion that he was a git.
The erosion of Easter Island has revealed comically spindly stone bodies under the famous giant stone heads, which has led to anthropologists believing that the native Rapa Nui people worshipped mathematics professors.
Ayers Rock was renamed back to its original name, Uluru, when its previous owner, British poet and comedian, Pam Ayres, grew sick of her name being spelt incorrectly. Now, of course, it mainly gets mistaken for the communications officer in the original Star Trek, though, at point of writing, William Shatner is yet to ‘put the moves’ on the large sandstone mount. There is, however, a restraining order on him issued on behalf of El Capitan.
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is the first geo-hominid to be recognised by an international sporting body (WWE). Hailing from Hawaii, he self-identifies as igneous. Due to his non-binary ‘troll’ status, he was unable to compete in the 2004 Athens Olympics, though successfully sought an exemption to act as a curling stone at Vancouver in 2010, being used in Sweden’s semi-final defeat of China in the women’s competition.
Kid Rock is not a real rock but is actually made of a type of thermoplastic and yeast.
*1 Source ‘Smack My Britches Up – The Autobiography of John Carver’ J. Carver; Plymouth (Penguin) 1621
Treatises of Gloria 