Erratic Drift

Find a small stone in an urban area. Ask the stone if it will play with you. If it agrees, gently nudge the stone along the street, observing where it goes and how it moves. Stop when the stone escapes.

Rolling Stone Drift, Glasgow, 2021

Photo credit: Callum Rice

Rolling Stone Drift, Minty Donald, 2025

When I was about seven, I walked to and from my primary school in the outskirts of Glasgow four times a day. I’d often spend one of the walks – on my way home – kicking a small stone I’d chosen along the pavement, trying to stop it escaping into a drain or rolling somewhere inaccessible. I talked to the stones. If I managed to keep the same stone with me all the way home, I put it with the other stones I’d collected in a hole in the concrete where the gatepost of my house had once been. And then I forgot it. Returning the next day, I couldn’t tell which were ‘my’ stones, which had escaped, and which had found their own way into my stone sanctuary.

Recently, I’ve again been kicking stones around cities. I’ve felt a similar attachment to the stones I’m kicking, and a similar investment in stopping the stones escape. I wonder why I feel this momentary lithic connection? I have been thinking about humans’ relationships with stone beyond its pragmatic use as tool, weapon or building material. I’ve been thinking about what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls ‘geophilia’: a love of the lithic. [i] Is my attachment to the stone underpinned by a sense of kinship? Perhaps through the stony matter of my body: my bones and teeth? Or through an older sense of geological kinship now largely forgotten amongthe global minority but still foundational in Indigenous ways of being? I am moved by Cohen’s words: ‘humans have always desired the endurance of stone. They scratch a small hole and bury their dead; they place rocks over their bodies as if to keep the spinning world still’.[ii]

When I kick the stones, I try to be sensitive to their shape and weight, and to the matter and topography of the ground over which they roll. I don’t try to tightly control the trajectories they take; I don’t have the skills to do so. But sometimes, when a stone settles by a steep kerb or in a pothole, I find myself trying repeatedly to flip it back onto the pavement, to continue with me on our drift. I’m not always content to let the stone escape. Is this attachment or a sense of ownership? I’ve claimed the stone as my own and I don’t want to let it go? Or is it, simply, that I don’t want the game to end?

I find myself paying close attention to the lithic skin of the city streets: concrete; tarmac dotted with white chips of marble; paving blocks of various sizes, set in diagonal or rectilinear grids; red slabs with protruding bumps that act as tactile markers of a crossing-place; cracks, scars, patches, and potholes; undulations, sometimes where tree roots warp the pavement; high kerbs of granite, and dropped kerbs… I take heed of the distinctive features of each city’s stony surfaces: the ubiquitous plaquetas de Madrid: square concrete paving tiles, which measure 150 by 150 centimetres, laid in diagonals; Glasgow’s tarmac pavements dotted with white marble chips; or historic bluestone pavers forming the sidewalks of New York’s Greenwich Village. I think about where these materials have come from and the people, processes and networks that have brought them here. Are they local stones, like the Berroqueña granite with its distinctive black patches, which was quarried from the Sierra de Guadarrama around fifty kilometres from Madrid, and which forms some of the city’s older kerb and flagstones? Or are they granite slabs imported from China, now found in Glasgow, Madrid, and New York City?

I think about how the cities’ lithic skins hinder penetration by water and traps heat. This lithic skin makes climate-related problems of flooding and rising seasonal temperatures more severe.

I remember reading that the cement industry is ‘responsible for approximately seven percent of global carbon dioxide emissions’.[iii]

I think about people who live on land without the impulse to cover it with an impermeable membrane. In Manhattan, I think about the Lenape people displaced by European settler-colonialists. I remember an exhibition in the Museum of the City of New York where I saw plans for the levelling of the island that the Lenape called Manhatta; plans for erasing its natural topology to ‘blanket’ it with an urban grid. [iv]

The stone I am kicking settles in a corner beside a wall clad in blocks of white Colmenar limestone, quarried about sixty kilometres from Madrid. I notice the imprint of a tiny fossil shell in the stone. I think about the ancient lakes that once covered this part of Spain. I am reminded of something I read, by philosopher Manuel de Landa. De Landa describes the evolution of human life in terms of ‘mineralisation’: a transition from invertebrates to creatures with endoskeletons, and then a later ‘mineralisation’ where humans ‘developed an urban exoskeleton’ designed to ‘control the movement of human flesh in and out of a town’s walls’.[v]

The sounds of the pebbles change as they skitter over ‘natural’ and human-made rock, iron inspection-hatch covers and gratings. Sometimes there is a resonance: a hollow, higher-pitched tinkling, like the sound of ice skimming across a frozen pond. Here there are cellars, tunnels, or other excavated spaces beneath the pavement.

I think about the geological maps I have looked at where different lithic strata are marked and categorised. The keys to the maps list categories of ‘superficial deposits’ – previously known as ‘drift’. And they list categories of ‘made’ and ‘artificial’ ground: strata created by humans through mining, quarrying, and tunnelling, or through landfill and deposits from demolition. I think about where the lithic materials of the city have come from; how they were extracted or created, shaped, and installed; how they travelled to be here; and who and what were involved in these processes.

As I kick the stones I look down and not up. This is not the touristic gaze that takes in grand edifices and vistas or seeks out elevated viewpoints to survey the sweep of a city’s streets, parks and squares. I zoom in and not out. I notice fragments of crumbled brick and sandstone, slivers of render peeling from walls, concrete chips and dust. For a moment, perhaps, I experience the city and its buildings as drift, as an accumulation of lithic matter, only momentarily settled.

On busier streets, my focus shifts to other people: trying not to get in their way, nor to inadvertently kick stones at them. I think about what the people I pass might be doing, where they are going, and who or what led them to be here. Mostly, I avoid eye contact and wonder if they notice me, a white, Scottish woman in her sixties, intently kicking a small stone along the pavement. At a pedestrian crossing, the green light changes to red and my stone is stranded in the middle of the road. A man heading in the opposite direction gently nudges it to the safety of the kerb. Heading down Lexington Avenue in Manhattan the stone I am kicking is poached playfully in a skilful soccer tackle.

Sometimes, I imagine the stone I am kicking as a miniature ‘erratic’. Erratics are boulders transported, typically by glacial ice, and deposited on bedrock of a different lithic type: they are rocks out-of-place. In Madrid and New York, I too am perhaps an erratic.

I think about the cityscape as at once geological and architectural: an ongoing negotiation among human and other-than-human forces. I wonder if the geological landscape beneath and within the architectural one is often, intentionally, left out of public conversations about cities and urban planning. In whose interest is it to omit information about mine shafts beneath peoples’ houses in Glasgow? Or about unclassified landfill materials used to make local parks in Madrid? Or about the landscape and lifestyles of Indigenous people erased Manhattan’s grid? Or about the conditions of quarry workers in China, from where some of Glasgow’s granite paving slabs are sourced? (I have been told that pieces of human finger have been found in consignments of Chinese granite.) Less troubling, perhaps, to focus on an image of architectural landscape as something that is largely inert: designed, regulated, and managed by humans. Easier to pave over the unruly, other-than-human forces that can erupt within the urban fabric. Better not to dwell on the consequences of humans’ own lithic interventions: the carbon footprint of making anthropogenic rock like concrete; the legacies of toxicity and subsidence from ‘made’ and ‘artificial’ ground; and the obscenely exploitative conditions of global mineral extraction, rooted in colonialism. More comforting, perhaps, to forget that the geological landscape predates and will outlast humans’ intentions and control.

No. We really need to remember all of this.

But maybe I am getting carried away. What does kicking a stone around a city street have to do with inequitable urban planning decisions, global extractivism and colonial legacies, or the persistent and catastrophic belief among the globalminority that we humans are more important than the other stuff of the Earth? Maybe it is just kicking a stone.

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[i] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015),19-66.

[ii] Ibid., 30.

[iii] Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, (London and New York: Verso, 2022), 50.

[iv] Museum of the City of New York online exhibition, accessed October 4, 2024. https://thegreatestgrid.mcny.org/

[v] Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 27.

Rolling Stone Drift: recorded drifts

As part of Architecture Fringe 2021 we enacted and recorded three drifts in different parts of Glasgow with three invited participants. The videos document those drifting conversations.

Rolling Stone Drift with Rachel Clive, Glasgow, June 2021

Rolling Stone Drift with Neil McGuire, Glasgow, June 2021

Images: Callum Rice

Editing: Nick Millar