[The] venerable Eastern esteem for wilderness explains the popularity of scholar’s rocks, single stones which have been carved into intricate, dynamic shapes by the powers of water, wind and frost. They were harvested from caves, river-beds and mountainsides, and mounted on small wooden pedestals. The stones – which scholars kept on their desks or in their studies, much as we might now keep a paperweight – were valued for how they expressed the history and the forces of their making. Each detail on a rock’s surface, each groove or notch or air-bubble or ridge or perforation, was eloquent of aeons. Each rock was a tiny, hand-held cosmos. Scholar’s rocks were not metaphors for a landscape, they were landscapes.
Many of these rocks have survived and can be seen in museums. If you stare at one closely enough, and for long enough, you lose your sense of scale, and the whorls, the caverns, the hills and the valleys which nature has inscribed in them can seem big enough to walk through.
Robert Macfarlane – Mountains of the Mind