St. Cuthbert's beads

The "beads" are thick discs or short cylinders, which, when the crinoid was still alive, were articulated to form a branched structure, linked by soft tissue, nerves and ligaments which occupied the central hole (lumen).

The first known reference to Cuthbert's beads in a documentary source is found in an account of a visit to Lindisfarne by a John Ray in 1671: July the 22nd we rode from Cheviot, or rather Waller or Wooler, to the Holy Island, nine miles, where we gathered, on the sea shore under the town, those stones which they call St Cuthbert's beads, which are nothing else but a sort of entrochi.It is unclear to what extent the origin and nature of the fossils was understood in earlier times.

It is clear that in their first documented mention as "St. Cuthbert's Beads" by John Ray in 1671, they were understood to be "entrochi", and by 1673, Martin Lister hypothesised that crinoids were "plants petrified".

In Sir Walter Scott's poem Marmion, written in 1808, St. Cuthbert is described (by fishermen) as creating these bead-like fossils at Lindisfarne, Northumberland.

But fain Saint Hilda's nuns would learn If, on a rock by Lindisfarne, Saint Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame The sea-born beads that bear his name: Such tales had Whitby's fishers told And said they might his shape behold, And here his anvil sound: A deadened clang - a huge dim form Seen but and heard when gathering storm And night were closing round.