Art in Echoes
Neolithic artifacts where the main source of inspiration for Echos, but in partucular it was the maseheads, painstakingly carved from beautiful rocks and found broken thousands of years later, which ended up being at the centre if the story, more so than the stone circles or tombs.
When I look at an artifact which was crafted by human hands all those years ago I can't help thinking about how it was made, why it was made and who made it. Who was the person who spent hours working on this object which has survived buried in the ground and is now sitting in a museum?
So when it came to writing the book based on Neolithic Orkney I had wanted to write for years it should have come as no surprise that I would place an object like the stone maseheads, and the individuals who made them, at the heart of the tale.
Other forms of art made their way into the book as well, like the grinding of naturally occurring ores to make pigments or tiny beads made out of clay and shell.
