Released 15.05.25

The Conversation

In this episode, Sophy speaks with English travel writer and novelist, Philip Marsden, about his new book, Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Rocks, in which he explores the interconnectedness of rocks, metals, history, and the natural world. Of all the books he’s written, Philip says, this is the one he’s enjoyed writing most.

His story begins in Cornwall’s tin and copper mines, which fuelled the Bronze Age and early British Industrial Revolution. Philip then traces a seam of alchemy, extraction and Enlightenment history through Germany, the Alps, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and the Balkans, finishing in Georgia. 

Sophy and Philip talk about how travel usually takes place from a horizontal perspective: A to B. But Philip instead takes things vertically, dropping into the abysses of the Earth and examining how its rocks, metals and minerals are reflected in the firmament above.

He discusses ideas of universality put forward by the German polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and  the poet and artist William Blake. He takes us from the Nebra Sky Disk — a Bronze Age calendar and map of the night sky forged with bronze and inlaid with gold — to the Netherlands’ great inland 19th-century sea. We learn about ‘the waterwolf’, about the magical properties of vitreous green shards of meteorites, and how gold in Georgia is harvested from rivers by soaking a sheep’s fleece. This is a conversation that draws the listener into a new consideration of alchemy and the forces that have shaped humans and the metals we in turn have shaped. 

Books discussed:

Philip Marsden
— Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Rocks,

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
— Faust, a Tragedy
— The Sorrows of Young Werther

Laura Beatty
— Looking for Theophrastus: Travels in Search of a Lost Philosopher

Horatio Clare
— Orison for a Curlew: In Search for a Bird on the Edge of Extinction