[Despite] the odd suspicion that Mr. Garner is showing off …, there remains the sense of an age gone by, that still lives on in the Garner Quartet.

Granny Reardun forms the lynchpin between its predecessors. Poised between worlds of quarry and forge, it traces a progress from Stone Age to Iron; from stone getters to brick setters, from monoliths to machines. The world is changing and Iron's "aback of everything".

But the view is tinged with retrospective irony. For the young Promethean who tells his grandfather "I'll not cut stone" is surely the grandfather who closes his smithy two generations later in Tom Fobble's Day. Time and tide wait for no man, but nor do they wait upon craft or machine. Block, forge and loom will have their day, but The Stone Book wears out eternity. And though Granny Reardun's weather-cock may top the church, it is an...