Faced with a foot-square block of limestone – smooth and blank – how do you start? How liberate the hidden Michelangelo or inner Barbara Hepworth? (When disaster is always just a chisel-slip away!)

Graeme had some designs on paper – simple or more intricate – that could be transferred, carbon-copy-like, to the smooth face of the stone. Ready to chip away, under Graeme’s guidance in the basic techniques, into a three-dimensional relief, such as one might find in the porch of a mediaeval church out in the fens.

The stone is soft, easily worked, with hand-pressure sufficient for detail and smoothing. On the dusty picnic tables two dimensions will become three as the morning progresses and the sun shifts round.

One lady, however, emerging from lunch into the sunlight fierce on her morning’s handiwork, looked disappointed. “It’s rubbish,” she said. “It’s just flat.” Until Graeme set the block on its edge, angled it to the sun, and the flower she’d carved sprang into light and shadow. She was really chuffed, and keen to take it home and set it up in the garden – somewhere where the sun would catch it, of course.