Quartz

Available for over a year

Walker and writer Linda Cracknell is drawn to the luminosity of the quartz she finds on Ben Lawers near Loch Tay. It's her local Munro, and is one of Scotland's most popular mountains. The appeal of quartz, she realises, goes back time out of mind. Linda's aware of dozens of decorated quartz pebbles that have been found around Scotland, many of them in Orkney and Shetland. Smooth and comforting in the hand, were these pale, luminescent stones charms of some sort, were they used for healing or slingshots, or were they perhaps part of a long forgotten game? Linda's essay is the first of five this week in which different writers reflect on how a favoured location is determined by its underlying geology. Producer: Mark Smalley.