Flint Country: A Stone Journey – guest post by Laurence Mitchell

Posted on July 1, 2025

I came to write this book by way of a roundabout route. Although I have lived in East Anglia for most of my adult life, flint, abundant though it is in this part of the country, wasn’t something that had always been on my radar. As a rule, I was generally more interested in stones of a very different type: the sarsens that stand in circles at prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge and Avebury, or freestanding in the hills of upland Britain.

East Anglia doesn’t have sarsens or megaliths but it does have a generous scattering of boulders that come with their own sense of mystery – erratics from the north that were transported here by ice and deposited haphazardly across the countryside here during the last glacial period. What it also has in even greater abundance is a vast number of medieval churches, a reflection of the time when the region – Norfolk and Suffolk in particular – was one of the most densely populated parts of the country. These buildings are invariably built largely of flint, the only readily available stone in these parts. It is this same indigenous stone that also provides the raw material for many of cottages and farm buildings that characterise the towns and villages here. Flint also lies as pebbles on the beaches and as plough-shattered shards strewn across the fields of this largely agricultural region. Although flint can also be found widely throughout the chalk country of southeast England, it feels to me that in counties like Norfolk and Suffolk its ubiquity is inseparable from the genius loci of the landscape here.

More than just a building material, flint is a stone that can be examined from a variety of perspectives – geological, archaeological and architectural. As a material resource, it has played a central role in technologies that have, through the ages, ranged from hand axes to ecclesiastical masonry to flintlock rifles. Tool-maker, fire-starter, church-builder – the smooth, voluptuous form of flint nodules has even inspired art, in particular the work of sculptors like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

With Flint Country: a Stone Journey I wanted to write a book that tied together different facets of this unique stone. I was neither equipped nor inclined to write a geology or archaeology text, nor did I want a book that focussed exclusively on medieval flint architecture, fascinating though it is. I wanted instead to come up with something that connected all of these strands and placed flint in its human context, exploring the essential role this stone has played in culture and technology since earliest humans began to walk erect. Perhaps the best way to describe this book is as a sort of lithic biography of flint, a natural and cultural history of the stone. As much as anything, it is a book about place: a personal response to the landscape in which I live, a region inextricably connected to the land and the geology that it sits upon.

Place is important. One of the most enjoyable aspects of researching this book was the excursions I made to a variety of flint landscapes – pebble beaches, shingle spits and chalk cliffs – both in East Anglia and further afield. Of the landscapes encountered in the book, some, like the beach at West Runton and the shingle spit at Norfolk’s Blakeney Point, were already familiar, old friends even. Others, like Dungeness in Kent, Cuckmere Haven in East Sussex and the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland, were new to me and a delight to explore for the first time.

While Flint Country is largely about place and material culture there is a time element too. A flint nodule holds time in its grasp: linear and cyclical time – past and present entwined. This is especially true if it has been worked by hand, as a prehistoric tool or as a building block in a medieval wall. As well as the deep geological past, when the stone took form within the deposits of warm oceans 90 to 140 million years ago, it may also hold a multitude of other histories: the Palaeolithic past of early hominids, who more than a million years ago utilised the stone’s ability to produce a razor-sharp edge to develop the earliest technology; the Neolithic miners who painstakingly prised it in bulk from pits in the chalk, and the medieval stonemasons who skilfully knapped it to construct the beautiful buildings that we still admire today – men whose own understanding of time was constrained by scriptural orthodoxy that declared the world to be only a few thousand years old.

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 Flint Country: A Stone Journey by Laurence Mitchell publishes on the 10th July 2025.

Laurence Mitchell uncovers the stories that flint has to tell us in this celebratory journey through the natural and cultural history of the stone.

Beneath the bands of chalk that cover the UK lies flint, a mineral that has shaped our landscape, history and heritage. Flint Country tells the story of this abundant resource’s formation, what we can learn from its fossil records, and how it has been worked with and prized through millennia – from our prehistoric and ancient ancestors through to the present day.