Go west? Follow the road west to Santiago de Compostela, or perhaps even further west, to Finisterre, the end of the world. The shell I took with me; the book is The Scallop: studies of a shell and its influences on humankind, edited by Ian Cox and published in 1957 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Shell Transport and Trading Company, Ltd. Yes, that Shell. It’s rather a lovely book, whatever reservations one might have about the publisher, with a wide-ranging expanse of subject and expertise, from the biological (the habits of the shellfish themselves), to the theological-historical (the Camino de Santiago, my own special interest).
Kathleen Jowitt 