Here’s a lovely thing. It’s a poem about an ancient place, by Mark Edmonds and Rose Ferraby – or as Mark describes it, “words by me, images by the two of us” – in the form of an illustrated book. It’s mostly the story of the making of a stone axe 6,000 years ago. A quarry high in the Lake District draws the maker up to find the right stone, where the axe is roughed out, then carried back down and finished; the description attempts to convey that this means more to the maker than the mere winning of a useful implement. Interleaved with this is the briefer story of (one assumes) a knowledgeable archaeologist who finds up there an abandoned, unfinished axe; he thinks he can beat the problem that defeated the neolithic knapper, and at the end succeeds. He descends with the axe, “Six thousand years in the…