The Pebble Spotter's Guide

By Clive Mitchell and National Trust Books

A beautiful little guide to one of life's simple pleasures – pebble spotting. Where science meets mindfulness. Learn to appreciate their beauty, discover the amazing journey that brought them to you, search for the rare ones. Leave no stone unturned.

Turn a day on the beach or a seaside holiday stroll into a treasure hunt with this lovely little guide to identifying pebbles. 

Pebble spotting is one of life’s simple joys. There’s nothing quite like searching the rocks on a beach until that special one catches your eye – a perfect shape, a gorgeous colour, an intriguing pattern.

But what is it? Use this beautifully illustrated little guide to find out, and to discover your pebble’s fascinating life story and secrets. It could be even more special than you thought…

Geologist and passionate pebble spotter Clive Mitchell has created a charming and wonderfully browsable book that is a perfect companion to a day out or holiday, or an idle moment at home.

This book contains entries on 40 different types of pebble, complete with detailed facts about the composite rock’s structure and where to find them, with examples including:

Flint

Feldspar veins

Spotted slates

Serpentinite

Granite ovoids

The rare rhomb porphyry – the holy grail of pebble hunting

The book includes a space to ruminate on your own findings, taking note of the treasures that you pick up along the way and discovering the secrets of the stones beneath your feet. 

The Pebble Spotter’s Guide is the perfect introduction to everything you didn’t know there was to know about the mindful pleasure of pebble spotting and the wonder of pebbles. Simply sit on a beach or next to a stream for 10 minutes and find amazing treasures at your feet; there is much to discover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jun 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911657477

Clive Mitchell

Clive Mitchell is the classic British geologist with check shirt and beard, a beer drinker and passionate about rocks. Born in Bristol, he grew up in the village of Congresbury on the northern edge of the Mendips in North Somerset. Family holidays in Cornwall and Devon were spent collecting pebbles on the beach, his first introduction to geology. Scroll forward fifty years, Clive lives with his family in Nottingham and is an industrial minerals geologist at the British Geological Survey. He has been lucky enough to travel all over the planet especially Africa and the Middle East working on mineral resources. Clive is an enthusiastic geoscience communicator and can often be found online, especially on twitter, helping to identify rocks for keen amateur geologists.

Book preview

IllustrationIllustration

A ring of sandstone pebbles with veins of quartz.

Illustration

I dedicate this book to my beautiful wife Joy.

We have shared many happy times on beaches, with the occasional pebble picked up along the way, and look forward to many more.

Contents

Introduction

A–Z of Pebbles

Features

The Secret of Finding Pebbles

The Art of Pebbles

The Magic of Pebbles

Skimming Stones

Pebble Poetry

Glossary

Index

Recommended guides

Acknowledgements

Introduction

They say that pebble-hunting is what geologists do on holiday, and my first experience of geology was over 50 years ago, picking up pebbles on the beaches of Cornwall and Devon on family holidays. I had no idea what they were. It was purely the tactile pleasure of holding a perfectly smooth pebble that fitted neatly into the palm of my hand. So while a more technical definition of a pebble is any rock between 4 and 64mm (3/16–21/2in) in diameter, mine is simply:

"A pebble is a smooth rock that fits

neatly into the palm of your hand."

This of course means that pebbles will range in size depending on how large your hands are – and that is part of the point – the pleasure of a pebble is personal. The best pebbles are always the ones that you find yourself, that appeal to your own preferences for colour, texture and shape, and slip into your hand as if they were designed just for you.

As a professional geologist I like to know what my pebbles are made of, and I can usually work it out on the spot. For the non-geologist this will be a little harder as rocks just look like, well, rocks. Pebbles are usually, but not always, formed from a naturally occurring rock that has been worn smooth by the action of water on beaches, or in lakes and rivers. There are also pebbles formed from artificial materials such as concrete, brick and glass; while these are not rocks, they often make interesting pebbles that are sometimes hard to distinguish from rocks. Older forms of concrete can often look like a pebbly sandstone.

A few basics to set the scene, geologically speaking. I have been referring to pebbles as rocks. You might have been calling them stones, but this technically only refers to rocks that have ‘stone’ in their name such as limestone, sandstone, gritstone, siltstone and mudstone. If you start using the word ‘rocks’ instead of stones, you’ll be in my good books.

Illustration

Gneiss

Naturally occurring rocks fall into three categories:

•Igneous: these are rocks that have formed from molten magma, ranging from those created by volcanic eruptions, such as basalt and andesite, to those with large crystals formed by slow cooling underground, such as granite and gabbro.

•Sedimentary: these are rocks