Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Karrick Sound ·
Why the Quarry Stones Face the Sea
The granite blocks left in the disused quarry above Karrick Sound all face the same way, toward the water, and the villagers say the stones were cut by men who were waiting for a ship that never came back.
- status: rumor
The quarry above Karrick Sound closed in 1909, when the granite seam was worked out and the company went bankrupt. It left behind a great bowl of grey rock, half filled with rainwater, and a scatter of dressed blocks on the slopes: squared and polished, some as tall as a man, lying where they had been left when the carts stopped coming. Most of them are buried now under bracken and heather. But every one that still stands, the villagers say, faces the sea.
The rumour is that the stones were cut for a ship. Not a building, not a bridge, but a vessel. The quarrymen, the story goes, had been commissioned to carve a set of granite ballast blocks for a schooner that was to carry the company's stone across the sound to the cities of the south. The ship was never built. The schooner's keel was laid in the yard by the harbour in the summer of 1908, and then the company's money ran out, and the yard closed, and the blocks stayed where they were on the quarry slope.
The quarrymen did not leave. They waited. They said the schooner would come round the point one day, on the first clear tide after the equinox, to take the blocks away. Every morning for a year they came up the hill with their picks and their barrows, and they set each block upright on its end, facing the sound, and each evening they went back down to the village to wait. Nobody came. The company's accountant wrote to say there was no ship and never had been. The quarrymen did not believe him. They said he had never seen the water on a clear morning, when the light on the sound looks like a road that goes out past the horizon.
The last of them, a man called Hugh Penn, died in the quarry hut in the winter of 1909, waiting for the tide. His last words, according to his sister, were that the stones were ready and the ship was late and they would have to go down to the harbour to fetch it.
The stones are still there. The villagers have counted them. There are forty-one standing blocks on the slopes, and each faces the water, and none has ever been moved, though the heather has grown up around them and the frost has cracked some along their faces. The children say that on the first clear tide after the equinox, if you stand by the quarry gate and look out across the sound, you can see the shape of a schooner's sail on the far horizon, very faint, coming in toward the point.
Nobody on Karrick Sound has ever gone up to the quarry on that tide. The grandmothers say the blocks are waiting for the ship, and that the ship is waiting for the blocks to be loaded, and that as long as neither side gives up, the sound will stay calm and the boats will come home safe.
This story is told by the harbour master's family, who say they have never seen the sail, and who have never once failed to check that the quarry gate is locked on the first clear tide of the year.