Last year we began our Wandering Rocks series of walks by visiting some of the erratic boulders that travelled here from Wales on a glacier 450,000 years ago. While most of the boulders are to be found in the suburbs to the south and west of Birmingham, for this walk we'll be heading to the city centre where an outlier erratic can be found disguised as a parish boundary marker.
In Counter-Tourism: The Handbook Crab Man introduces the concept of "beached heritage" to describe artefacts that have travelled and washed up in unlikely places. "Once you become sensitive to these 'erratics' you will begin to navigate a landscape from which such anomalies, large and small, repeatedly pop up."
On this walk we'll be visiting other examples of beached heritage including an architectural spare part repurposed as a workers' memorial and a piece of Birmingham's industrial heritage literally marooned on an island.
We'll also be joined by a very special guest of the mineral variety: our very own "wandering rock". If you fancy it then you may take a turn in carrying the guest for part of our city centre tour.