In ancient times it was believed that this type of boulder was a meteor and had magical powers and the grufftys (much like our modern day Morris dancers) would worship these stones and on the summer solstice the the grufftys would have a two day celebration where drinking, bell ringing and dancing around the stone with multi-coloured hankies was had, and this was known as yonning the yonner.
Many lowland areas of Britain affected by Pleistocene ice sheets are now covered by glacial drift. This is made up of sheets of boulder clay and sand and gravel, left behind by ice sheets and distributed by their melt water. The material has been derived from the land surface over which the ice sheets passed. The erosive power of the ice collected limestone boulders (erratic) from the Ribble Valley and transported them south. These limestone boulders were excavated from glacial boulder clay by a process known as hushing. The process of moving the rock, by the glacial action left its marks on this rock. On one side you will see that the rock is rounded and reasonable smooth, this will have been caused by the action of the ice moving over it, perhaps as it got stuck. On the other side the rock is angular and broken, this must have been caused when it was broken off its bed rock, or as it was scraped along the underlying rocks at the bottom of the glacier. If you look at this angular side you can just make out a familiar shape.
A glacial erratic is a piece of rock that deviates from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests; the name "erratic" is based on the errant location of these boulders. These rocks were carried to their current locations by glacial ice, often over hundreds of kilometres. Erratics can range in size from pebbles to large boulders such as Big Rock (16,500 tons) in Alberta. Geologists identify erratics by studying the rocks surrounding the position of the erratic and the composition of the erratic itself. Often large boulders that have been transported by a glacier, like this one, will be carried on top of in the body of the glacier. This means that they can travel vast distances, remember the ice age covered most of the northern hemisphere of the earth. If they did travel 'on top' there would move around like a pebble on a beach and become very rounded, also being eroded getting smaller and smaller.
A good example of this can be found at cache GC1JN6E. This one however did not have the same wear imposed upon it and so probably did not travel as far.
Erratics were once considered evidence of a massive flood approximately 10,000 years ago, similar to the legendary floods described in the texts of ancient civilizations throughout the world.
To claim this as a find you could upload a photograph of yourself and the bolder, or just the bolder, though this is optional.
What you will need to do is answer the following questions. Please message or email them to me and feel free to log your find at the same time.
1) describe the rock, concentrating of it's different faces..
2) Looking from the path side what shape can you see 'cut' into the rock, by the glacial erosion.
3) Explain why the different sides of the boulder are indeed different..
4) Finally I require you to estimate the circumference of the boulder.
Thanks for visiting this cache, I hope you found the listing interesting.
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To conclude I would like to think Manchester Airport for permission to place this cache since it turns out this park is on their land.