The Pebble Spotter's Guide

A beautiful little guide to one of life's simple pleasures – pebble spotting. Where science meets mindfulness. Learn to appreciate their beauty, discover the amazing journey that brought them to you, search for the rare ones. Leave no stone unturned.

Turn a day on the beach or a seaside holiday stroll into a treasure hunt with this lovely little guide to identifying pebbles. 

Pebble spotting is one of life’s simple joys. There’s nothing quite like searching the rocks on a beach until that special one catches your eye – a perfect shape, a gorgeous colour, an intriguing pattern.

But what is it? Use this beautifully illustrated little guide to find out, and to discover your pebble’s fascinating life story and secrets. It could be even more special than you thought…

Geologist and passionate pebble spotter Clive Mitchell has created a charming and wonderfully browsable book that is a perfect companion to a day out or holiday, or an idle moment at home.

This book contains entries on 40 different types of pebble, complete with detailed facts about the composite rock’s structure and where to find them, with examples including:

Flint

Feldspar veins

Spotted slates

Serpentinite

Granite ovoids

The rare rhomb porphyry – the holy grail of pebble hunting

The book includes a space to ruminate on your own findings, taking note of the treasures that you pick up along the way and discovering the secrets of the stones beneath your feet. 

The Pebble Spotter’s Guide is the perfect introduction to everything you didn’t know there was to know about the mindful pleasure of pebble spotting and the wonder of pebbles. Simply sit on a beach or next to a stream for 10 minutes and find amazing treasures at your feet; there is much to discover.

About the author

Clive Mitchell is the classic British geologist with check shirt and beard, a beer drinker and passionate about rocks. Born in Bristol, he grew up in the village of Congresbury on the northern edge of the Mendips in North Somerset. Family holidays in Cornwall and Devon were spent collecting pebbles on the beach, his first introduction to geology. Scroll forward fifty years, Clive lives with his family in Nottingham and is an industrial minerals geologist at the British Geological Survey. He has been lucky enough to travel all over the planet especially Africa and the Middle East working on mineral resources. Clive is an enthusiastic geoscience communicator and can often be found online, especially on twitter, helping to identify rocks for keen amateur geologists.