Lake Serpentine Sculpted by Sam Vado
Our freshwater, spring fed lake used to be a quarry, did you know? It was dug for serpentine, mainly, a beautiful green rock used for sculpting but, in the case of Trevassack, road aggregate! Once they hit the natural spring about 7m down, they got a bit fed up of pumping the water away all the time, so the quarry closed in the 90s, slowly emerging as a nature lake – and the rest is our history.
We’ve had lots of interested people enquire about the history, geology and nature of Trevassack Lake, but few as invested as local stone-worker, Sam Vado.
He visited the other day with a very heavy looking box.
It turns out he had acquired a lump of rock from the quarry and polished and skillfully shaped it into an exquisite natural representation of a book!
It’s a very tactile piece, heavy as a small boulder but you can’t help but keep touching it. Thankfully, Sam gifted the charity with the piece so it is currently on display in our Reception for you to stroke.
A few words from Sam himself:
Today I brought a stone book to Trevassack, Children’s Sailing Trust.
For less able children and their carers, saying,
For many divergent people and definitely for me,
Their first recourse, sense of place here, is the natural world.
That means Stone, and Water, and Trees, and Flowers and Birds
And down the list is people, more difficult to identify with
Wholeheartedly, they are so plus and minus at once.
If you can read stone, a ‘book’ is a natural bridge
So I find myself in my workshop, making stone and wood pieces
Pieces of moon and earth, the solid material we walk upon, and may
Rest, in grain of wood, timelines from the life of trees, seeded here
Coming out of the blue, pulled up by sun, despite gravity.
Some of us find impossible to integrate the greater glimpse of oneness
Into the small mind games we are expected to play:
I used to be a joiner, -now more of a loner, at ease here
I cannot read or speak for anyone else except by chance
Sometimes, I just enjoy making these pieces, so heavy
They are my grounding, lest I fly off skywards
They are acknowledgement of being here
That the mirror of people cannot quite reflect
Most are too full of story to realise their inner emptiness
There is only nature, one may call it being, Being, -we are it.
The book was well received, thankyou for appreciating
