The rock in the picture above is a quernstone. Fascinating, yeah? Look at all the holes in it. Quernstone’s don’t look the way they do naturally. They’re rather manmade objects–large stones carved into flat shapes to provide a surface to mill grain on. They’ve got a pretty intense history, and variations on the idea they represent can be found all over the world. The British outlawed their use in Scotland in a bid to leave tenant farmers in that country more dependent on their landlords since their landlords were much more likely to be able to afford the more expensive and technologically complex mill. This law has only been repealed in the last decade or so, though I expect there aren’t many Scottish citizens who ran out to carve their own Querns when it was.

The particular Quernstone seen above is located in the Irish Museum of Archeology in Dublin. It’s quite interesting to me from a personal perspective because, before seeing this stone, I had no idea whatsoever what a Quernstone was. I had, however, seen one unearthed to much consternation in the farm my family once owned in West Virginia.

it was a really glorious hunk of rock, Granite worn through with hundreds of small, equally distributed divets. My grandfather had no idea what it was. He sent it to a friend of his who taught archeology at the university of West Virginia and the friend sent it back. He was baffled, too. Perhaps the rock back home isn’t a quernstone, though it doesn’t look it. It does remind me that the home I’m missing now is a home other people missed before. I don’t even know the Native American tribes that would have inhabited my former home, milling grain on that quernstone my grandfather later unearthed. Have their descendants stopped grieving for the home they’ve lost? Are there neW homes they’re grieving for instead? It can be hard to remember that the joy you’re forgetting losing was made from the joy another lost. Place is funny that way.