Giant's Rock

The Giant's Rock, also known as Giant's Quoit or The Moonstone, is a large boulder on the rocky foreshore. It is composed of a type of gneiss containing the semi-precious mineral garnet not found anywhere else in the UK. A theory for how it got here is that during the last Ice Age, the boulder was once picked up by a glacier in Northern Europe which eventually flowed into the sea, where the glacier crumbled into icebergs. The rock was trapped in one of these icebergs, which floated here and became stranded on the high tide line. The ice melted away to free the imprisoned rock, leaving it on the shoreline where it is today. The boulder weighs in excess of 50 tons. From a back-of-envelope density calculation, the iceberg would likely have been in excess of 1500 tons in order to float with the heavy rock inside it.