Laurence Mitchell is a travel writer with a number of guidebooks and walking guides to his name. He also writes features for magazines like Geographical, Walk and Discovering Britain. He has contributed to Echtrai Journal, Elsewhere: a journal of place and several anthologies, and was a regular guest writer for the Berlin-based magazine hidden europe for many years. His first book for Saraband, Westering, was published in 2021 and his second, Flint Country, published in 2025.

Holly

Laurence, welcome to the Writing Life podcast.

 

Laurence

Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.

 

Holly

We should let people know that we are recording today in our lovely podcast studio at Dragon Hall. But we are in the middle of heatwave number four this summer.

 

Laurence

Number four so far.

 

Holly

So if we sound at all dozy or like we’re stopping to have a drink of water, that’s why.

So it’s fantastic to have you here today. Your book Flint Country has already come up a lot of times for us at National Centre for Writing. Obviously, you were winner in your category at the East Anglian Book Awards this year, and you’ve also run a brilliant workshop for us as part of NCW Academy on the Spirit of Place and on place writing. And I think it would be great to kind of take that as our theme and our lead into the conversation today.

So when we think about place writing, I think it’s often grounded in a specific region or a landscape or a trail, but you’ve actually chosen a physical material to anchor your story rather than one place. And that’s flint. So I think my first question is: why flint?

 

Laurence

Well, I think it came around about really because it was during lockdown. I sort of had the first ideas of this, and my background really is sort of travel writing, and that’s what I’ve done before. But during the, I think it was the first lockdown, I just started, I was at a bit of a loose end really, and I wanted to start getting writing on it. What’s a perfect time to do some writing during lockdown, when there’s not much else you can do?

But I was sort of thinking of different subjects and things I couldn’t really write about, and everything else felt a bit too detached and far away, or, you know, a memoir about something else. And I wanted to do something there and now. And then, on one of my lockdown walks, I mean, it sounds like a road to Damascus sort of moment, but it wasn’t really. But I started, I had a regular walk I used to do, quite close to my home, because you were allotted time for walking.

Yeah. And I quite often ended up in this church nearby, or the churchyard nearby. And it wasn’t a particularly old church, Norwich is full of medieval churches. This was a Victorian church. But it was faithful to the common material for building churches in this city and in this area, flint.

And I’d never really given flint that much thought before. I mean, I was aware that it was there, and I didn’t know much about it. I knew it was, the whole region was sort of covered. All the fields were covered in flint and everything like that. But then I thought, well, maybe here’s a theme, a link, something I can expand on.

Because obviously I did a lot of research later on, but I was aware that flint wasn’t just a very important building material, particularly for this area. It was very much of the sort of build of East Anglia.

 

Holly

Yeah, we see it all around us, don’t we?

 

Laurence

All around us. Absolutely, not just in churches either, in farm buildings and houses and its walls. And Norwich has got some particularly fabulous walls.

I’m quite an enthusiastic archaeologist, or amateur archaeologist. And I also think, well, yes, this goes back to flint tools.

And in fact, the story there is, one day I went another way and I was walking and I saw a great big mural of these flint axes, these sort of Neolithic axes. And I thought, I wonder what that place is. I wonder what that shop is for.

 

Holly

Is that in Norwich?

 

Laurence

In Norwich. Yeah. And what I thought at first, me being sort of very fanciful, thinking, ‘Oh, maybe they’re selling sort of reproduction flint tools. They’re great. When it’s open, I’ll go and get some.’

 

Holly

There’s a real market for those.

 

Laurence

Yeah. But then I thought, well, that’s a bit too niche even for Norwich. Norwich has these sort of quirky things.

And then, of course, I looked online. ‘Oh, it’s a hairdressers. It’s a ladies’ hairdressers’.

 

Holly

Yeah. There’s a colleague of mine who goes to Flint.

 

Laurence

Yeah. I’ve met people since who go to Flint. But I mean, I was quite ignorant of ladies’ hairdressers in Norwich, so I wasn’t aware of that, but it just seemed all these little pointers. And so I thought, well, yeah, maybe I can start writing about this.

And that’s the key to that, is actually it’s all very local, most of it anyway. So Flint Country, as it came about, is largely East Anglia based, but not exclusively. I do go to various other parts of Britain and actually occasionally go abroad, but it’s mostly centred in East Anglia, where, as it says, Flint Country is very, you know, this is the whole geology of the place or the building material is of flint.

I mean, you could equally say the same thing about, I guess, parts of Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire.

 

Holly

But that’s so interesting that it was this material that then led you to approach the landscape, or how you portrayed the landscape, in a particular way. And you’ve mentioned memoir, you’ve mentioned amateur archaeology, geology, and, I mean, all of those things. The book is such a beautiful blend of all of those things, also of science, of natural history.

But, to be honest, when I was preparing for this, I was thinking, if I’d just read that this was a book about these particular subjects, I don’t think I’d necessarily have been drawn to that combination of themes. But I really, really loved this book, and I found it really accessible, with flint as a way in, perhaps because I am from the area and I see it all around me.

But I think it’s a real skill, interweaving all of those different elements, geology, archaeology, science. And, as you mentioned there, I wanted to talk to you a bit about the research and all the information. And yet there’s still a real lightness of tone to the book. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Is that something you’re very practised at? I mean, does that come from your journalistic background, that ability to kind of blend all the research but still keep it very, very accessible?

 

Laurence

I don’t know. I suppose it just comes from my own sort of preference when I’m… I like to, well, things I enjoy reading, I like to have a certain lightness of touch. Although, it doesn’t mean you can’t have profound ideas or talking about things.

When I was writing the book, I was a bit aware that I didn’t want it to read like a series of disconnected essays because there’s a danger in that. This is flint building material. This is flint for churches. This is flint’s archaeology, etc. Though I have sort of done it separately like that, I’ve tried to have this common theme throughout and return to the centre, if you like, which is sort of living here in Norwich.

 

Holly

So it’s rooted in a place, but the flint allows you to kind of go and explore and journey into these other areas?

 

Laurence

Yes, exactly. I mean, it’s rooted in place. And also what I think I also went into, well, what I did go into also was looking at very particular flint landscapes, which are particular to this part of the world.

I’m thinking of the spits on the coast, which are flint pebbles, like Blakeney Point, famously Orford Ness, even Great Yarmouth, which people don’t think about, is actually, where Great Yarmouth is built wasn’t there six or seven hundred years ago. It’s built all on flint, and a spit which has developed into solid land. And then it became a fishing port.

 

Holly

Yeah. I didn’t know that until I read the book.

 

Laurence

No, I don’t think I was aware of that, to be honest, until I looked a bit more into it.

And what I didn’t want it to be was a geology book. And that was one of my fears. I think people thought, ‘oh, it’s a book about flint’, you know. Well, it is, but it’s not about… I go into the formation of flint, but I try to sort of not dwell on it too much.

I’m more interested in it being a cultural history, sort of interaction between, as a material for human use.

 

Holly

Yeah, that’s really interesting. That’s not one that was on my list. But you’re right. Cultural history, social history in some ways. And that’s really interesting.

And I guess there’ll be people listening who are writing similar things, who are trying to blend lots of different elements into their writing. I wonder, because you do bring your own experience, you are the narrator of the book, and I wonder how you went about, or how a writer would go about, not dominating a narrative of place with your own story, how you keep that balance.

 

Laurence

It’s a very good question. I’m not sure I can answer it. I sort of want there to be a presence there, as you say, as a narrator. And I want to bring in little bits of memoir when I think they’re relevant as well, because there are some that go back quite a long time that, to me, are quite extraordinary experiences that I feel I should incorporate.

But on the same hand, it’s not, I don’t want it to be all about me. ‘Here I am walking along a beach, looking at flint,’ sort of thing. So I try and sort of detach as well. So how I do that, if I do it successfully or not, I’m not sure.

 

Holly

I think you do it very successfully. Otherwise, as you say, it would have been classed as pure memoir and it wouldn’t be what we’re talking about, which is place writing and is about this idea of the spirit of place.

I’d be quite interested to talk a bit about that, because I know it’s something that, you know, when you led your creative writing workshop for us, it’s something you explored.

But it seems to me a very difficult thing to pin down, the spirit of place, because surely the spirit of place is invisible. So I wonder what you think, or what you found, perhaps as you were writing Flint Country, that needed to be included to capture the spirit of place.

 

Laurence

That’s right. I mean, spirit of place is a difficult thing to pin down, and it means a lot of different things. Traditionally, people refer to the genius loci of a place.

 

Holly

Yes. And what is that Latin for>

 

Laurence

It really goes back to the Romans who thought of particular places as having a spirit or a deity that sort of protected it. And so they would develop a shrine or something like that. And often the cult of a particular, you know, to follow that deity, that cult, and that was belonging to particular places, like the Mithraic cult in London, where, you know, underground God, which was worshipped by Roman soldiers particularly, I think. So that was a very, very particular meaning.

I did a bit of research in this when I was doing the workshop, but also it has a very specific meaning in architecture. Architects are, I think, often told you must develop the spirit of place. And what they mean is, I think, just to make sure that the building fits into the environment in a sort of pleasing way.

I mean, I suppose the obvious example of that is if you go to the North coast and you want to build a house in Cley, for example, you, the idea of not using flint pebbles is just, you know, you can’t do it. You have to do it, very, very strict planning laws.

 

Holly

For anyone who’s listening who doesn’t know Cley, it is a beautiful kind of chocolate-box seaside village where pretty much every building is made of flint. I’d say all the cottages.

 

Laurence

And I believe there was one building that was put up there that wasn’t, you know, just put up without the permission, and it had to be demolished, as extreme as that.

 

Holly

Gosh, yeah. So architecture is very central to spirit of place, but what about the sort of… because what comes through in your book is the history of a place, or perhaps a folklore or myth associated with the place?

 

Laurence

Yes. I think there’s a sort of whole weave of things that you can attribute to a place. I mean, the question remains, does everywhere have a spirit of place, or are other places, you know, devoid of that entirely? But that’s another question.

But, I mean, the spirit of places, it’s the peculiarities of the place. It’s the places, the things that make it specific, and it’s the things that make it different. It could be in the geology or the vegetation or the wildlife. It could be the history associated with it or the prehistory associated with it, or it could also be personal, personal connections with it or family connections.

And more often than not, I think it’s a mix of all these things together. So places that the spirits of place. And I think that the writer’s job, if they’re focusing on that, is to try and bring these things across. So it’s there to see for other people.

 

Holly

Yeah. And as you said before, that it doesn’t become, as with your book, just a book about geology, just the facts, or just about the myth or the architecture. It’s a blend of all of those things.

You mentioned there, you know, does everywhere have a spirit of place? And I’m really interested in what you think, because I think we all have probably quite mundane places, but that are special to us for certain reasons. So would you say that every place is worth writing about?

 

Laurence

Undoubtedly, yes, I would. I mean, I think we’ve, in the twenty-first century now, developed a lot, or built quite a lot, of what philosophers might call sort of non-places, airports, out-of-town shopping malls, that sort of thing. A lot of new-build developments and housing developments which appear to have no character.

But of course, people live there, they have lives, they bring their own histories. And, you know, after a while, it develops a sort of patina of people living there. So, yeah, I think everywhere has a spirit of place and everywhere is worth writing about.

There’s a quotation, I think it’s this American poet Wendell Berry, and he’s talking about, well, he’s talking about it in terms of sacred places. He says there are no un-sacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places. So, in other words, everywhere is sacred unless it’s been desecrated in some way, spoiled and ruined. But then it becomes something else anyway.

 

Holly

That’s so interesting, isn’t it? So therefore, again, if you’re writing about place, it’s A, you’re including perhaps a personal narrative or the stories of humans that have interacted with the place, but then also the history of it.

And actually, that’s another thing I wanted to ask you about, about places that perhaps somebody might have had a bad experience of, or places that perhaps are perceived as difficult places, maybe graveyards or battlefields, for example, where bad things have happened.

But I wonder if the act of writing might be quite redemptive for place, whether, through the retelling of the story of the place, you can reframe it for readers or for the writer themselves.

 

Laurence

Well, I certainly think it can be redemptive for the writer to actually, you know, confront, probably too strong a word, but to take the place that creates this atmosphere or these bad memories and to sort of work the way through that, I think. And so, yes, it can be quite redemptive, I think.

But, I mean, there are places, like you said, battlefields and churchyards, there are always going to be places where the grief associated with them is quite obvious.

Yeah. I think it’s also, often a lot of new housing developments are now in places like old hospital sites, which are, you know, places. Well, they’re places of suffering, places of joy too, of course, hospitals, because good things happen there as well.

But I mean, also workhouses. I told my wife I was talking to her, we were looking at these workhouse places which had been turned into really nice apartments, but we both said, ‘I wouldn’t want to live there personally, just the embedded sort of memory of the place and the suffering that took place there’.

 

Holly

Yeah. So there’s something about the spirit of the place.

 

Laurence

The spirit of the place actually in the very fabric of it, though that may be just a sort of personal view, but that’s really sensitive about it, perhaps.

 

Holly

Well, no, no, I think that makes complete sense, doesn’t it? When you, it’s like with all of our houses, you know, once you understand who’s been there before or what might have happened there before, it can have a real effect on your connection to the place.

But there’s something really interesting here then about a writer’s identity and the act of writing about place. And I wonder as well, if we talked about the act of writing place as redemption, but also, I guess, maybe like reclamation, because there are some places which might be, I don’t know, I’m thinking about housing estates or, you know, run-down places where people are kind of assumed to be a type of person who lives there, but actually, by their own telling of that place, they can reclaim their story or the story of the place.

 

Laurence

And sometimes these stories are completely lost. I think the writer Ian Sinclair wrote a lot about the development of the Olympics in east London, and one of his major concerns about it was just all this history was lost.

You know, it was taken. The people were living their lives. Their grandparents had lived there. And all of a sudden, it was changed and they had to go and live somewhere else.

And a lot, you could argue, ‘well, they had much better housing now’ and things like that. But I mean, the thing is, the actual history of those streets was gone and it hadn’t been recorded.

 

Holly

That’s a really good point. So actually, their telling of that place, were they to write about that area, would teach us something very different.

 

Laurence

Yes. And it’s also this notion of home as well. You know, we all have different notions of home, but we all know what it means. And it’s different from just house or dwelling or building. You know, home is a very strong emotion that we have a sense of.

And if we lose our homes or whatever, you know, then it’s obviously a very tragic time in our lives. But I do, you know, I think the notion of home, I’m just very interested in that whole idea of, you know, what becomes home? How do we make a place home?

I’m thinking not just about a house. I’m thinking about a place to live. And, you know, again, going back to sacred sites and things like that as well.

 

Holly

Yeah. I think it’s fascinating. I guess all of these elements that, when a writer is, you know, has a place as their subject, all of these things are kind of in the mix, aren’t they? As a way in, as you used flint as your way in.

I just wanted to go back to what we were talking about, buildings, and connection to buildings, and particularly the flint churches in East Anglia. And you write very passionately about them and sort of, I guess, monuments as well that are made of flint.

And I wonder how thinking about architecture and people’s connections to buildings affected the way that you write about place, those stories, and how people interact with those physical entities.

 

Laurence

Yes. I’m not sure about that. I’m not sure about whether the people who live in flint houses are different from anybody else, sort of thing.

But I mean, it does, obviously, the whole landscape of a region is important. And one of the characteristic things of East Anglia, which everybody goes on about, is how flat it is, of course, which it is fairly flat. But, you know, let’s not dwell on that too much.

 

Holly

We have our mini hills.

 

Laurence

We have mini hills, that’s right. And there’s a lot of rivers and estuaries, and a very, you know, extremely different… And that’s going back to the coast as well.

We have a very, Norfolk in particular, the coastline of Norfolk is very distinctive. It’s very unique, really, in many ways. These, these sort of… And again, that comes back to flint again, you know, flint spits.

Generally speaking, you know, those places make it special and they give a particular atmosphere to the place. So I think, yeah, I mean, living in a flint village in North Norfolk, it carries a, so, I mean, I suppose it carries a certain degree of sort of quaintness now, doesn’t it? It’s seen as, you know, an idyllic sort of place to live.

 

Holly

But do you think you learned by exploring the buildings and perhaps those places where people come and interact with the flint, or live within the flint? Do you think that kind of gave a different flavour to the writing? Gave you a kind of different angle on it, rather than just simply exploring the flint and how it came up from the ground and…

 

Laurence

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, and also, I would think I was sort of interested in… I mean, this is how I got into the flint in the first place in East Anglia.

I mean, I’m very into sort of sacred sites and megaliths and things like that, which East Anglia doesn’t have because we don’t have that sort of stone. We have, but what we have here in East Anglia is flint, and that’s so that I think it crosses time.

I mean, it gives a link back to, obviously, there are lots of medieval references. Just walking out of this building, everywhere, the houses, the churches and so on, we’re all immediately in that age. It’s not so much of the twentieth and twenty-first century here really, where we are.

But you can go to other parts where you’ve seen things that, you know, places like Grime’s Graves, where there were Neolithic flint mines, and, or, you know, and also various sort of Neolithic, Neanderthal sites too.

So, you know, it gives you a sense of how people have actually lived here for a much, much longer than you can possibly imagine. And they’ve come and gone and, you know, they’ve come across Doggerland to, to reinhabit the British Isles and everything. But East Anglia had this continued continuity of people living here. And flint has been a sort of common factor throughout that.

I’m thinking of the Happisburgh finds in the early twenty-first century, 2001, I think it was, when they found these handaxes in the cliffs there, and they were able to date it very precisely. And they knew it was sort of Palaeolithic, which is very old indeed, but they managed to date it to about eight hundred thousand years ago. So it’s nearly a million years old.

And these weren’t made by, you know, Homo sapiens. They were made by three or four back, earlier sort of hominid. But they, you know, had the same sort of characteristics. They were wandering hunter-gatherers, I guess, who were here, and they left their evidence there.

So it’s just this incredible sort of spread of history, and they had a flint axe. And that’s the thing that fascinated me, is because flint was the first technology for an awful long time, for much, much longer than, you know, anything else. I mean, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, so, you know, in the scheme of like nearly a million years, are just nothing. There’s a few thousand years ago, tiny percentage of time. And the atomic age is just a, you know, one minute to midnight thing.

 

Holly

It’s incredible. Hearing you talk about and sort of seeing your face light up, thinking about that kind of span of time.

And actually, it reminds me, I really wanted to ask you because, you know, you are, as you say, there’s almost a million years of history and geology that you’re exploring in the book, and yet you’re also talking about the more recent history. You’re also, you’ve got yourself in the present day. So you’ve got a kind of a very human lifespan there.

And I wonder, you know, was the treatment of time a kind of structural challenge when you were putting the book together? How did you sort of balance those different time scales?

 

Laurence

Yes. Well, I think what I tried to do, I tried to sort of pull it together a bit in the last chapter, the whole notion of time really, because I think increasingly so, we’re living in a time where the past, the present and the future are sort of coalescing a lot more. You know, everything, particularly in the digital age, where everything, you don’t have to watch things in real time on the television anymore. But it’s more than that. It’s just constantly we know what happened, you know, and so it’s all been conflated together.

And I think that’s part of the interest that a lot of people, particularly in this sort of troubled time really, when things we never quite know what it’s going to be like in a few years’ time or even tomorrow, really, that it’s quite comforting to look at this huge span of time and the continuity that took place throughout that time.

And that’s, I think, why there’s quite a big draw to looking at sort of megalithic sites and that sort of thing. You know, Neolithic, Stonehenge and Avebury and all those things as well.

But I mean, flint is actually central to all that because it was the main tool they had, before, well, long before they started building with it. You know, it was used as a sort of main thing for cutting and for fire-making as well as being as basic as that. Flint was what they had.

And if they didn’t, if you were in a region where you didn’t have flint, then you would take it with you. You’d actually carry flints with you so you could make fire and you could use the tools.

 

Holly

Can you identify in other places in the country where flint has moved around, if people have found Norfolk flint in other places?

 

Laurence

I can’t think of any particular places, but yes, it’s certainly there. I mean, I think, for example, in Scotland, flint is very rare in Scotland, though it’s found in some places near Aberdeen, and it’s found in one place, a couple of places in the Western Isles.

But, yeah, I mean, they found flint weapons, or flint tools rather, in places miles and miles and miles away because, obviously, they took them with them. And also, where a place where they did find flint, there were often middens of all the sort of flint work that went on there. They’d actually think, ‘Oh, great, we’ve found a source of this stuff. We’re going to make the most of it and do a lot of work there.’

So they leave a big pile of the shards, and then they’ll take the sort of the actual tools with them.

 

Holly

That’s so interesting. So, in writing about one landscape, it kind of helps you then connect, as we were saying, to other places in the country.

And it just makes me think, you know, the passion you have for this material. This inanimate material, which is, you know, it’s interesting because most narratives, it’s human subjects who are providing us with, you know, drama and conflict and all of those things.

And, of course, you’re the narrator, and of course there are human experiences that you bring into the book. But I wanted to ask you whether you consciously had to think of the flint, and maybe the land, the sort of flinty landscapes, as characters in themselves. You know, do you feel like they had to be animated to tell your story?

 

Laurence

I haven’t animated, but I mean, I think they have a personality, certainly. I mean, I think landscape has a personality in some ways, you know, in some sort of non-fiction, or even in fiction. You know, it can actually be the character. The landscape is the most important character in the same way people talk about film in that way. You know, they say Lawrence of Arabia, the main character is the desert, you know, and that sort of same notion.

So I think that’s very true of, I mean, I write about some of these flint spits in the book. I write about Orford Ness, which is quite well documented by a lot of writers, actually, Blakeney Point and also Dungeness in Kent, where Derek Jarman lived his last years of his life in his fisherman’s hut.

 

Holly

Which is an incredible landscape.

 

Laurence

It’s an incredible landscape and, in a way, it’s got parallels to Orford Ness. They had weapons research, secret laboratories and things there.

And, yes, it’s got lights. It’s got two lighthouses, actually. But Jarman made this garden around his cottage, and it’s wonderful because he was working with extreme restrictions. You know, if you’re planting plants into a flint shingle, there’s not a lot of things that will survive there, but there are some. And he made the most of it, and he found the ones that worked.

But he also used, he also did a lot of sculpture using found objects in the garden too. A lot of that was flint and what we call hagstones, the ones with the hole in the middle.

 

Holly

Yeah. And it’s fascinating, actually, as you say, landscape has character. I hadn’t really considered that. But of course it is. When there’s, as you say, in a novel, there’s a backdrop of incredible mountains or whatever, it’s that spirit of place that is infusing the story.

 

Laurence

Or marshland areas.

 

Holly

Yeah, it’s fascinating. So you mentioned there about the digital age and the kind of effect that it has on conflating time. But I also wanted to ask you about perhaps the place of landscape or place writing within the digital age, because it feels like with social media, well, not even just with social media, but, you know, every place we go, every landscape is photographed. You know, it’s mapped. We can, at the click of a button, we don’t need to go there. We can see it.

So I wonder, you know, you mentioned that you’re writing, you’ve done in the past, is travel writing. But what’s the kind of, what do you think that the role of the modern travel or place landscape writer is?

 

Laurence

Well, I think I would describe myself more as a landscape or a place writer now rather than a travel writer, because I think I’ve moved in that direction because you just said what’s happened now with a lot of travel writing. In the digital age, you can sort of look at somewhere, you can look at it with Google Earth, you can see from the sky, you can see everything about a place before you get there. And then there’s no end of sort of vloggers who walk around with a camera on a stick talking about the markets there and everything like that.

So, okay, you can go somewhere and try and ignore all that and just go with an open mind. But it’s increasingly difficult. I mean, and it’s just this arc of how travel writing has sort of changed, even through my lifetime really.

I always wanted to be a travel writer, and I eventually sort of became one. At first I thought, well, you know, it’s not for people like me, but then I realised, well, why not have a go? And I always liked travelling.

But what’s happened now? I mean, you know, when I first went travelling, I used to get books out of the library and they had all the, and they were like written in the fifties by, you know, by sort of quite crusty old colonial people. And the photographs were black and white, and you had sort of a vague idea about somewhere, but you didn’t really, you just sort of saw it through their eyes.

And then, I mean, I eventually, you know, I went on the overland route to India and all that back in the seventies. And of course you think, oh, it’s in colour. And it’s very, very sort of different. But even then, even then, it was just the period just before guidebooks. So your information came from other people and just naivety in a way. People, but people are very kind and helpful on the whole. Fellow travellers, and you helped each other along.

Then came the whole age of sort of guidebooks, which I’m, you know, guilty of as well, because I contributed to quite a few guidebooks. I’ve written quite a few.

 

Holly

Well, where would we have been without guidebooks before the internet?

 

Laurence

Yes, exactly. But what’s happened now with the internet and a lot of guidebooks are published, guidebook publishers are really struggling in a way because people don’t think, well, why should I pay twenty pounds for a book when I can just get it all for free off the internet?

 

Holly

And also, why would I carry a heavy guidebook in my rucksack when I’ve got my phone?

 

Laurence

Well, that’s it, that’s what’s happened. The genie’s out of the bottle, I’m afraid. You know, so to go back there, it’s difficult. But, yeah.

So, in a way, I was finding it, you know, you can still write about places, but you’ve got to give your own spin on it. And some guidebooks do that anyway, as well as just giving you practical details. They do that. I mean, I like to think mine do, but, yeah.

So I think what happens now is, rather than sort of look for the exotic, you know, writing at Venice or, you know, Angkor Wat or whatever, find places that are particular to you. And I think it’s really important also to, you know, we have, there are places that we all have, personal places that are quite special to us.

And I think it’s almost a matter of sort of re-enchantment of the, the more, you know, the ordinary, you know, in a way, thinking, okay, well, you know, most people don’t think anything special about this place, but I do. What is it, what is it about that that makes it special to me?

And it’s probably, like I said earlier, it’s a weave of, you know, what it looks like, its geology, its natural history, but also your own personal story as well, or your own history, or the histories associated with it.

 

Holly

I love that. Yeah, that idea that perhaps re-enchantment, that was the word you used, because, I mean, I think of somewhere like the Lake District, for example, which is, you know, so over, there’s a lot of overtourism there.

And I guess you go there and you could have a list of things that, you know, are there or that you know about it that are kind of in everybody talks about. But actually, the really interesting thing would be to read a book from the perspective of somebody. I mean, I guess like you, exactly like you’ve done for us here in Norfolk. Actually, I know the places I could go in Norfolk, but I didn’t know about all this flint. And that’s going to lead me on a kind of an alternative experience.

 

Laurence

Well, I mean, I think the Lake District is a really good example about how we perceive places through time. I mean, it was made famous by the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and so on, and waxed lyrical about how beautiful it was. And it is a beautiful place and it’s a wonderful place.

But not that long before that, it was a place to be feared. People used to fear mountains. People lived in their villages and towns, and they didn’t, you know, these were wild places where, why do you want to go there for? It really was like that.

It was only sort of two or three hundred years ago where we started seeing the beauty in these landscapes. And it’s only in the last fifty years we’ve overpopulated them with various things.

 

Holly

And of course, now there’s the Beatrix Potter Museum and all these sort of sites, specific places. But it would be wonderful to go there with a very alternative piece of place writing in your pocket that can kind of help you find some of the hidden gems.

 

Laurence

Yes. Right. Yes. And I think that’s it. I always find it quite, if I’m going somewhere that is quite famous and has particular sights, you know, that you must go and see, and you can’t help yourself but go and see them. I always like going back a second or third time and just completely ignoring those places and going just where my feet take me.

And you often find you get more out of the experience because you, with all you involve, you’re interacting with people who aren’t involved with tourism for a start, you know, so you get a very different perspective of more ordinary lives.

 

Holly

Yeah. Which is another great tip for people, then, who are wanting to write about places. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been written about a lot before, because perhaps you talk to someone different, or you find the hidden story perspective.

 

Laurence

Just try and look at it from a different angle.

 

Holly

Yeah, yeah, that’s really great advice. I want to ask you one question about language because you do, in the book, come back to the actual word flint various times and the etymology of it. And I wonder, as you say, you come across it as the name of a hairdresser. Did this sort of deep dive into the language of place, or did that help you to uncover more about your subject? What did it give you?

 

Laurence

I’m not sure it really helped that much. I mean, I thought, I think it’s quite interesting about the, you know, flint is used as a sort of adjective as well.

I mean, it’s used as a place name in North Wales as a town called Flint, which doesn’t have any flint anywhere near it. So that’s no good.

But I mean, like I said, Flint hairdresser is just a name and so on. But then, I mean, there’s a vineyard that’s set up in South Norfolk called Flint Vineyard, which is near Bungay, but it’s in Norfolk, just south-facing slope and all that.

 

Holly

Delicious wines.

 

Laurence

Yeah. I’m sure. Absolutely.

But in terms of wine, I mean, you know, flint is a word they use very precisely to describe the flinty character of a wine. As you know, they talk about minerality of the taste and everything like that.

But in another way, it’s used as a sort of slightly pejorative sort of way of describing somebody’s expression, you know, flinty, like a hard face, like, you know, uncaring, unsympathetic.

So, you know, in terms of that, I think it’s quite interesting how the word has been used. And Shakespeare used it quite a lot in that sense.

 

Holly

In the negative sense?

 

Laurence

Yeah. In the negative sense, in the sort of unflinching sort of character.

 

Holly

That is another, I suppose, advantage to the fact that you, as your way in, are kind of using this material that spreads beyond the landscape, kind of into language and into our minds. Brilliant.

I have got two final questions I wanted to ask you. One is potentially a big question, just because we talked about all the things that Flint Country is. You know, it’s memoir and it’s science and it’s natural history and archaeology. But I wonder whether you find kind of genre to be a very useful descriptor, because your book is so many things. Does labelling, and where it gets put in the bookshop, do you feel like it limits it?

 

Laurence

I do. I thought quite a lot about this, and probably I wasn’t so aware of it when I actually wrote it. But, yeah, it is hard to place, in a way, because it does cover quite a few genres.

And, well, I mean, I’m just thinking, if I’d sort of read a review of it or something, where would I go and look for it in the bookshop?

I mean, one large bookshop chain I won’t mention begins with a W. I found it in there and it’s under natural history, which is fair enough, you know, natural history. But then I thought, well, you know, it’s quite right being there, but I think it could also, then they’ve got a section on sort of local books and British. And there’s almost a section that’s not quite called place writing, but it is, and I feel it should be there, and it’s not there.

 

Holly

That’s interesting. So perhaps this is a new genre, which we’re not kind of…?

 

Laurence

Well, yeah. I mean, sometimes I don’t think it has… It probably does say in the back of the book, but, you know, the various sort of places to put it in a bookshop.

But, yeah. I mean, it does cross genres and I’m happy that it does, but I do think it’s hard to place in that sense.

 

Holly

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that, you know, as a writer, you write what you’re interested in, and it doesn’t matter. And it shouldn’t matter when you’re writing it.

And I think more and more, you know, creative non-fiction is a real blend. But it’s interesting then that kind of, once it goes out into the publishing world and onto the bookshelves.

 

Laurence

That’s right. And I think publishers are very keen to know, to be able to place it as well. I think that troubles them a bit if they can’t neatly compartmentalise it, in a sense, you know, where it should go in a bookshop. You know, they want to know what’s the selling factor of it or whatever.

I can understand they want to sell books, of course.

 

Holly

But it risks overlooking some of the nuance.

 

Laurence

Yes, it does. Yes, it does. And I mean, thankfully, I don’t think it’s ever been placed under geology, although, you know, it contains geology in there, because I feel I need to explain it.

But I mean, the thing is, I almost feel like it should have a subtitle: ‘This is not a geology book’, because, you know…

 

Holly

Yeah. I mean, and it could equally be found under memoir, but I love the idea of bookshops having a place writing section. I feel like that it could contain multitudes.

Yes, yes. Perhaps that’s a new campaign.

We’ve got time for just one more question. And we talked a lot about the fact that you, you research and there were lots of different elements that you researched. And I know that this book is so full of brilliant information and stories, but I’m wondering if there was anything really fascinating you uncovered that you sort of maybe had to leave out that didn’t fit the book’s structure?

Are there any hidden gems about flint?

 

Laurence

Oh, dear. I mean, there are, yeah, I think what I found at one time when I was doing my research, when I was, I mean, I went and travelled around quite a lot of places and things as well, but I did a lot of research and I did find myself going down rabbit holes.

Like, I said, ‘Why am I reading this PhD thesis on handaxe design?’ And because I was fascinated in it, but I thought, no, this is not for the layperson. This is not going to enhance the book in any way. So I think that sort of detailed stuff, otherwise it would become a completely different book. And it would have been an academic-type book. And I’m not an academic in that sense, and, you know, I’m certainly not a geologist or an archaeologist, you know, that very, very nuanced, very refined sort of sense of change and things like that.

So I did find myself occasionally thinking, no, that’s enough of that. Let’s get back to the nitty-gritty of, you know, what it’s about, rather than looking at fine sort of changes.

But, yeah, I mean, I felt that the whole thing about the design of flint tools was absolutely fascinating. You know, how one design basically lasted for half a million years and then sort of, ‘Oh, I know, we’ll change it and we’ll do it. Let’s make it slightly different.’ And it did, you know, and it was quite an organic thing, but it took an awful long time over, you know, thousands of generations, because, you know, what’s wrong with the old one? The old one still works.

So, yeah, that was very interesting to, I mean, I could have done, you know, there’s, well, books have been written, there’s an awful lot that could be written about churches and architecture and so on. But again, I just wanted to outline that and then look at that sort of architecture in the context of East Anglia particularly, particularly like round tower churches, which are unique, almost, not quite, but almost unique to East Anglia.

Ninety per cent of the world’s round tower churches are in Norfolk, you know, so that’s quite a feat. And I think, well, yeah, you can understand why they built them like that, but why didn’t they build them like that somewhere else where they also had the same materials? There’s no real clear answer to that. No one seems to know.

 

Holly

So it’s a real lesson for people listening, you know, who are writing in this, in this space, that you do have to make narrative choices.

And you might have done all this research, but maybe there’s a spin-off in there about, you know, flint tools that could sit in a different place in the bookshop.

 

Laurence

Yes. Possibly.

 

Holly

Oh, well, Larence, thank you so much. It’s been really fascinating to talk about your book and to think about what place writing really is. And I hope that our listeners have gained some real insights. I’m sure they have. Thank you.

 

Laurence

Thank you very much.