Over the past few months I’ve visited the beach on most days to look for interesting stones. I’ve found quite a few, including ones that look like a severed finger, a gaping jaw with teeth, a shop mannequin, a pigs snout… I’ve even stumbled upon a fairy loaf – something which would have been prized by our Neolithic antecedents – but none of these finds prepared me for what I came across a few weeks ago.

Most of the pieces I’ve selected have been relatively easy to photograph. Their charm has been apparent in one particular angle revealing the likeness that attracted me to them. Others have been more problematic, losing something in a two-dimensional representation because their objectness has gone beyond one facet. However, even these have succumbed to the camera, allowing one select image to sum them up, rather in the same way that a single photograph out of many, of an unwilling relative or loved one, will be able to capture them. For several weeks now I have re-photographed it from a number of angles. I even made a short video, turning it this way and that for the lens, but without success. I finally gave up selecting one particular viewing point and here instead have opted for a composite of several images to best display its appearance, but even these do not truly convey the experience of holding it.

About the size of a hens egg, it can sit in the palm of my hand as if made for it. Indeed it does seem made, more than developed through some obscure geological process, and while crude, it is perfect in its likeness of a small head; not just a mask, and not just any head, but that of a shrunken effigy, devil or gargoyle; a laughing satyr, something that would truly earn the appellation of a grotesque.

Yet I have no doubt it is naturally formed. There are no marks to suggest any kind of human intervention in its manufacture and I have come across other stones of the same composition, if not likeness. It happened, but how? Why? Is there any reason? Should there be one? It has sat on my desk for over a month now, looking back at me with the same wide smile whenever I glance at it. It delights, but also disconcerts me.