Ruth Tomlinson’s odyssey to uncover Britain’s ‘homegrown gems’

Gemstone hunting can take a jeweller to the far reaches of the earth. Or it can lead to Seaton, a beachside village on a quiet stretch of the Cornish coast, as it did for the London-based Ruth Tomlinson. “I’ve always been interested in spontaneous finds, and I thought it would be refreshing to look at what we have here in Britain that we might not be aware of,” says the Lancashire-born jeweller. 

This curiosity was the catalyst for Tomlinson’s new DiscoveRings project, which uses “homegrown” gems found in different parts of the UK, such as amber from Norfolk, quartz from the Lake District and Yorkshire jet, to be released in dedicated collections. The first launch, out this month, is a capsule of 10 one-of-a-kind rings created using agate she sourced while trudging along the Angus coastline near East Haven, a fishing village near Dundee.

Agate is a variety of chalcedony, distinctive for its banded structure that reveals almost psychedelic patterns when sliced open. It’s abundant but easily overlooked. “It just looks like an ordinary pebble, unless you know what you’re looking for,” says Tomlinson. She had Jan Lakowski, an Aberdeen-born social worker who has fossicked for Scottish agate since childhood, as her guide. Tomlinson quickly learned to distinguish agate nodules with their rough, dappled texture, formed over thousands to millions of years as lava cools and bubbles are frozen into cavities in the rock. 

“The first one Jan showed me looked like a lump of green rock, but inside was a beautiful turquoise-y colour with these natural swirling patterns. I found it incredible that these pieces can be found just washed up along wild coastlines,” she says. “You could walk along the beach and have no idea what’s there, but when you start looking there is so much beauty to discover.”

You’ll never find two identical stones

In October 2021, Tomlinson created a collection of four rings using materials foraged while mudlarking on the banks of the Thames, finding objects that dated back to Tudor and Roman times. Three of those were returned to the river, while the fourth now resides in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The new DiscoveRings project continues this theme: in the early 1900s, Victorian families would fossick along the Scottish beaches, pitching up for picnics in the woodland that lines the shore at coastal reserves. Brooches from the period would display different specimens of agate – as much a geological artefact as a piece of jewellery. Tomlinson did something different with the materials: her DiscoveRings retain the organic, unconventional aesthetic that has been a signature of her brand since she launched in 2001.

Although agate is considered a semi‑precious rather than precious gem, the value of Tomlinson’s “home-grown” odyssey lies, she believes, in the discoveries. “You’ll never find two identical stones. We spent a lot of time finding the most beautiful, interesting pieces.” She can remember coming across each of the specimens that now feature in her jewellery. “It really sticks in your mind where on the beach you found that piece of material, and what colours and patterns you discovered inside.” Some nodules might have lain undiscovered on East Haven beach for years; others might have been recently washed up by the tide. “Being the first person to pick up and appreciate a stone that was created thousands of years ago is quite a special thing,” she adds.

For the project, Tomlinson worked with UK-based stone cutters “to keep these skills alive, as it’s a dying craft in this country”. She tracked down a Hatton Garden-based craftsman, believed to be one of the last cutters trained in the British bell-peg method, to shape the agate. A second cutter, based in Hoxton, had a more artistic approach, incorporating sections of the nodules’ rough skin in freeform cuts that demonstrate “the honesty of where the gem came from”, says Tomlinson.

Sourcing materials for the next part of her collection took her to the South West Coast Path in Cornwall, a location that she’d heard produces amethyst, serpentine and the occasional diamond. But she quickly discovered that, as the majority of Cornish beaches are owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, any material discovered is therefore its property and cannot be removed. Instead, she worked with a British supplier to procure historical pieces of turquoise, originally sourced in the Gunheath China clay pit near St Austell as a byproduct of the 19th-century porcelain industry. She’ll set them in another series of rings whose design takes inspiration from Cornish cliff faces and rock formations, to launch in early 2025.  

Tomlinson’s connection to the sea is an important one. Some of her earliest creations featured tiny barnacles crafted from porcelain, while her signature Encrustations collection is inspired by tales of underwater worlds. She has used ocean diamonds plucked from the seabed off Namibia, and raw, tumbled gemstones, their edges softened through their journey down riverbeds towards the sea. “I like looking for materials on the surface of the earth that have been given by the waves,” she says. “The sea has been an inspiration for a lot of my work, so it makes sense that the materials I’m using were discovered on the coast.”

The DiscoveRings collection, Tomlinson says, has been a labour of love: “It’s quite a poetic sort of project. For me, it was a way back to the roots of the brand.” The people she’s met along the way – and the knowledge gained – will feed into her more commercial collections. “I want to show people the beauty that exists in this country, when you know where to look.”