When rocks take a walk

Every time I visit my beloved Anglesey, I spend several hours each day as an irrelevance in the landscape, sitting on my favourite rock, gazing out to sea, waiting to see what comes along. Nature-waiting, I call it: time well spent, even when nothing comes along.

I’ve written about sitting on my favourite rock many times before. But in September 2023, I reported an alarming new development:

this year began with something of a shock. After unpacking, I immediately headed down to my favourite rock, only to discover it had moved! Only by about a metre, but a major geological event as far as I was concerned. The rock is—or had been—part of the limestone bedrock. But, since my last visit, it had become detached, I’m guessing during a winter storm, and had been shifted slightly inland. Sitting on my newly relocated favourite rock gave me an entirely different perspective on life. I wonder if it will still be there next year.

My favourite rock was indeed still there the next year—and the next. But when I returned last month, in April 2026, it had disappeared!

I was astonished. This was not a small rock, and, in all my years sitting on it, I had never come close to getting my feet wet by the rising tide. Whatever storm dislodged the rock and moved it a metre or so in 2023 must have been pretty impressive. But now it had gone entirely. I began to suspect foul play.

It took me a while to work out what had happened to my rock. In its absence, I took to sitting on the step in the bedrock created by its removal. Without wishing to be disloyal to my absent rock, I have to say this new arrangement worked even better than the old, as my new seat was a couple of inches higher, and slightly more comfortable—if rocks can ever be described as comfortable. Gazing out to sea being the priority, it was a couple of days before I noticed fresh scuff-marks on top of the step in the bedrock—a trail of scuff-marks, in fact, meandering across the surface. I followed the trail a good thirty metres, and there it was: my favourite rock, upside-down in a new home!

What kind of storm must have moved my rock so far, physically lifting it up a half-metre step and rolling it all that way across the bedrock!

For old times’ sake, I tried sitting on the relocated rock, but it just wasn’t the same: the newly upturned surface was less comfortable than the old; the view was less impressive; and, as I later learnt, the incoming tide now submerged the rock twice a day. But I was glad the mystery was solved and that natural forces and not foul play had been involved.

The geologist Charles Lyell showed how the physical world is slowly shaped by processes and forces we can still see in action today: wind and water, fire and ice. His disciple and friend Charles Darwin showed how similar processes and forces shape the living world.

So now I have a new favourite rock to sit on: the step in the bedrock next to where my former favourite rock used to reside. Bearing in mind my old rock’s new location, I won’t be at all surprised if it has moved again the next time I visit. I’ll try to keep tabs on it. Perhaps it will end up wedged among other nearby rocks and, covered by the sea twice a day, begin to take on limpets, barnacles and seaweed. That would be cool. Inevitably, my former favourite rock will continue to erode: like us (and everything else) rocks wage an ongoing, ultimately futile war against entropy. But I’m sure my old rock will outlast me.

Which is a thought I find surprisingly comforting.