I was born in Papua New Guinea, the oldest of seven children of the Revd. Jeremy & Mrs Clarissa Hummerstone, the vicar of Great Torrington.
I was educated at Blundell's School; St David's University College, Lampeter & Warwick University where I read English and Italian Literature.
I trained to cut stone under Mr. Jim Donaldson in Northumberland, while he was working on his Swansong; a new church commissioned by Br. Harold S.S.F and dedicated to SS. Mary and Cuthbert at Shepherd's Law, Near Alnwick.
I then worked at Hereford Cathedral carving Early English Mouldings for the Lady Chapel with Capps & Capps.
I have spent the last seven years carving letters in slate in North Devon.
I am inspired by the eighteenth century gravestones that I see in the country churchyards hereabouts.
They have a simplicity and an unselfconscious freshness that has endured and that is not to be found in later work.
I have been influenced by the incarnational work and approach of Eric Gill.
More recently I have begun to study the work of John Baskerville, the eighteenth century Brummie manufacturer printer, typographer and gravestone carver along with the work of the other "writing masters" of that time.
My work continues a fine tradition of vernacular lettering and aims to create what Sir John Betjeman hoped to have as his own gravestone: a stone as clear and as simple as the frontispiece of a book.
A good gravestone is a tribute to and a remembrance of the value of life itself.
To carve names in stone is to believe that they will be read and remembered while there are still people who can read: an implicit testimony of gratitude for the life that we have been given.