Finding ways to characterise the nature of change and continuity is an important part of the historian's task, yet students find it particularly challenging to do. Building on her previous work on change, Rachel Foster sought to experiment with new approaches for helping her students to find analytical ways of describing change and continuity in the past. She reflected on the scholarship of historians and concluded that "thick description" characterised academic writing about change and continuity. Foster set out to find ways of giving her own students the analytical tools that would enable them to produce such writing. In metaphor, she found a fruitful source of inspiration.