The Living Stones

Book excerpt: A classic travelogue by Britain's foremost female surrealist painter, which immerses the reader in a dreamlike Cornwall where landscape and legend meet __________ 'Prodigious and inventive ... all her life' Guardian 'She thumbed her nose at convention' Jennifer Higgie 'One of the most interesting and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century' Amy Hale __________ Painter Ithell Colquhoun arrives in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So begins a profound lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present. Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun's Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore - and a place where everyday reality speaks to the world beyond.