In Search of Gems by Kenneth Steven review: 'delightfully accessible' essays on geology
This is an enjoyable and informative guide to Scotland’s gemstones, even for those with no knowledge of them, writes David Robinson
The same week this short book arrived for review, a friend came to stay, bringing a split quartz geode as a gift. It looks rather like the end of a French loaf with most of the bread removed and replaced with white crystals, and because it is the only geological specimen we have in our house, and because my knowledge of of rocks, crystals and gemstones is correspondingly minimal, I tried to remedy that before attempting to read this.
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As a result, my brain is clogged with adjectives (druzy, conchoidal, botryoidal) and nouns (hemiagate, iolite, cabochon) I shall almost certainly never use again. Because even though, now that I have done my research, I can absolutely see the beauty of banded fluorite, tumblestones of malachite and manganese dendrites, the hobbyist attractions of both geology and gemology remain lost to me.
Mercifully, as his title makes clear, Kenneth Steven isn’t so much writing in geological or scientific detail about gems as about his own searches for them, and searches mean stories and stories mean accessibility. That said, he has been collecting stones for a long time. “I have been a hunter for serpentine since I was five years old,” he writes. Five?! Me, I’ve only just looked up “serpentine” as a noun a couple of minutes ago on Google Images. Beautiful, though, isn’t it?
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The mini-essays here – half were first written as 14-minute talks for Radio 3’s Scotland’s Rocks strand in 2024 but are still online last time I looked – are delightfully accessible, each rounded off by one of Steven’s poems. The essay on serpentine, for example, recalls how his mother taught him the difference between these waxy, soft, green pebbles - so soft in fact that he has accidentally snapped a long one between his fingers - and the much harder ones made out of marble. He has, he says, found serpentine on every one of Iona’s beaches, with the best specimens on St Columba’s bay in the south-west, where the saint would most likely have landed from Ireland. Veins of serpentine also thread through the polished white granite of the abbey’s altar.
Iona is also the source of the amber pebble that Steven was given as a child and still has in his collection, even though it appears to have been quite a random discovery. Amber is most often found after storms have churned it up from the seabed - and perhaps because of that has often been talismanic. It is easy to understand why this should be so, and why the sudden appearance of something so golden might have seemed like a protective charm against drowning or - because of its golden translucence - a means of restoring eyesight. (Steven generally steers well clear of lithotherapy, or crystal healing, though the internet is chock-full of chakra-balancing gems).
The Victorians were predictably excellent at exploring the world beneath their feet, and Stephen repeatedly pays tribute to the work of mineralogist Matthew Heddle (1828-97), even though he posthumously turned out to be wrong about there being any diamonds three miles north-east of Ben Hope. But Heddle’s magnum opus, The Mineralogy of Scotland, provided the groundwork for WJ McCallien’s Scottish Gem Stones (1937) which fuelled and continues to fuel Stephen’s search for gems. “I feel that, with this treasure map,” he writes, “I’m somehow given my country to possess anew.”
We follow him as he goes about it: to Scurdie Ness on the Angus coast in search of banded agate (though not, unlike Heddle, using dynamite); to Beinn a’Bhuird on an unsuccessful hunt for aquamarine (alias blue beryl, “the wellspring for my fascination with faceted stones”); and to a hill near Aberfeldy for a treasured childhood memory of digging out garnets with fingernails from a boulder below Farragon.
Following Steven as he in turn follows Heddle is enjoyable and informative: he is an effective evangeliser for his hobby. And now that I know what to look out for, I’ll start off with serpentine.
In Search of Gems, by Kenneth Steven, Sarband, £8.99
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