A method of coping

I passed this house in a nearby village and was struck by the way the gate's wrought iron curlicues echo the lumps of quartz decorating the gate posts and the coping of the wall. It's a very common look in this village and many others in North Pembrokeshire where quarrying the coast for stone and slate was the obvious way to obtain building  material. Seams of quartz run through the rock like marzipan in a fruit cake.

Practically speaking, marking your gateway with lumps of crystal  rendered it highly visible especially on a dark evenings when there were no street lamps or vehicle headlights to help you find your way. But quartz's internal sparkle seems always to have been significant to the human species:  white pebbles  having been found in graves far back in prehistory including at the Whitesands Beach  excavations near St David's further west along the coast.

Collecting quartz lumps to decorate your rockery was popular in Victorian times and you could buy them from local sellers and dealers. It wouldn't happen now. In 2007 the novelist Ian McEwan, promoting his new novel On Chesil Beach,  mentioned in a radio interview that he kept a few pebbles from that enormous shingle bank on his desk. An outcry ensued, a fine was threatened and he was forced to dispatch them back to the beach.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/apr/06/books.booksnews

More about these decorative stones in a previous blip here.