The Living Stones

A classic travelogue by Britain's foremost female surrealist painter, which immerses the reader in a dreamlike Cornwall where landscape and legend meet

"Her responses to the aura of place are keen, and her eye for detail is excitingly sharp" -- Sunday Times

"She is sensitive to the ways of wind and water, the flowers and birds and trees" -- Country Life

In the midst of the 2nd World War, surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun withdraws from London to Cornwall, searching for a studio and a refuge from the Blitz, as well as from a shattered marriage. So begins a profound and lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county. It is a land of granite ridges and lush valleys, surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past makes contact with the present. There she finds a hut with no running water or electricity, and lovingly brings it to life, creating a haven for her creative pursuits, and slowly coming to think of these rivers, hills and caves, seen in every season, as her true home.

Drawn to the sacred and the beautiful, the wild and the weird, Colquhoun writes about Cornwall as a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore - and perhaps a place where everyday reality connects to the world beyond. In prose as gorgeously dreamlike as it is sharply witty, this inimitable artist gives us a travelogue deeply attuned to natural rhythms, local atmosphere and the eerie beauty of a place that is as much legend as it is water and rock.

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as her novel Goose of Hermogenes, she is the author of two travelogues, The Living Stones: Cornwall and The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.