The Other Side of Stone by Linda Cracknell was published in 2021 by Taproot Press. The time switches between 1831, 1913, 1990, 2003, 2006 and 2019, but it’s never confusing. It’s a quick read at just 146 pages, I think it’s really well written. The setting is rural Perthshire. It is a novella although some people have described it as a collection of linked short stories.

It begins with a stonemason cutting the keystone of a Perthshire woollen mill, he chisels the date 1831 into it, but on the inside face that nobody will ever see he carves a secret mark.

Basically this is the history of a building over the years, from its beginning to its end. We often say when we’re in old buildings “if walls could talk” and that’s really what Linda Cracknell has done in this book. The woollen mill has seen strikes and strife particularly in 1913 when they are so disgruntled that immigration to Canada seems like a good move to some. But the wife of one of the mill workers just hopes to get her husband to sign papers to allow her to be able to train as a nurse, she needs his permission and it looks like he’s never going to give it. She becomes a suffragette which gains her husband a lot of sympathy  – from the drunken men anyway.

In the later years the mill’s fortunes decline, as almost all of them did, until the land it was built on is returned to an agricultural use again, and a circle of some sort has been completed.