What will delight you as you arrive in this area are the wonderful limestone cliffs towering above. Around the base of these cliffs are Screes. Screes are composed of rocks that have weathered from the cliffs above and fallen to the ground below. Over time these screes form a slope of small, loose stones at the bottom of the cliff.
But what this earth cache is about is not these small rocks falling one at a time over thousands of years. No. You have come to see a river of rocks. One day, in the distant past, something catastrophic happened here. It probably began with a small rock like one of the scree rocks. Just a falling stone. But this stone dislodged another and another, and in a massive chain reaction hundreds of thousands of tons of rock began to fall. They crashed and bounced and thundered down, each rock rolling, falling and knocking down more in a huge torrent of rocks that flowed like a river down the mountain. You can see the boulders scattered down the hill where they came to rest as the rock avalanche ended. And as you look up above you can see where the mass rock fall started, at the top of this small valley.
The Joint Nature Conservation Committee has listed this site. They identify geological sites in Britain of national and international importance. This rock avalanche is one of those important listed sites.
To prove you have been to the site, please take a photo of you or your GPS with the river of rocks showing in the background, and answer the following question in your log:
WHAT IS THE APPROXIMATE SIZE OF THE LARGEST BOULDER YOU CAN SEE IN THE RIVER OF ROCKS?