Logan Rocks
Men Omborth, Cornish for balanced stone, sits about thirty metres above the sea on top of the Teryn Dinas cliffs at Treen in the far west of Cornwall, about three miles or so from Land’s End. Known as a Logan or logging stone from the Cornish word “logging” meaning rocking, it is one of several pieces of detached rock to be found in the county that are poised so finely on their base that they move backwards and forwards under the slightest of pressure.
They were once thought to be the work of human hands, connected with Druidic rituals and religious ceremonies. Legend had it that a person’s guilt or innocence could be established by a rocking stone; it would vibrate if they were guilty and remain stationary if guilty. Alternatively, according to William Mason’s Caractacus (1759), “it moves obsequious to the gentlest touch/ of him whose breath is pure; but to a traitor,/ though even a giant’s prowess nerved his arm,/ it stands as fixed as Snowdon”.
More prosaically, their shape and position are the result of a combination of glacial movement, erosion, weathering, and the laws of physics. A Mr Grove went to great lengths at a British Association meeting, reported The Trove in November 1890, to demonstrate that logan stones were the result of natural rather than human forces, having “by artificial attrition…made several miniature rocking stones”,. He showed “how by the action of the atmosphere on their corners, many large masses of rock, which have a tendency to disintegrate into cubical or tabular blocks, might gradually become rounded into the rude spheroidal shape generally presented by the logan”
Cornwall’s most famous logan, Men Omborth drew visitors from far and wide to gaze upon what Mason described as “yon huge/ and unhewn sphere of living adamant,/ which, poised by magic, rests its central weight/ on yonder pointed rock” and perhaps even see it move. “So evenly poised” was it, wrote Dr William Borlase in Antiquities of Cornwall (1754), “that any hand may move it to and fro; but the extremities of its base are at such a distance from each other and so well secured by their nearness to the stone which it stretches itself upon, that it is morally impossible that any lever, or indeed force, however applied in a mechanical way, can remove it from its present situation”.
It is always dangerous to leave a hostage to fortune, especially when the Royal Navy is around. Hugh Goldsmith, nephew of the poet, Oliver Goldsmith, commanded HMS Nimble, a six-gun revenue cutter which patrolled the Cornish coastline on the lookout for smugglers and attempting to seize their contraband. On April 8, 1824, finding themselves off Treen and close to the famous logan, he and nine of his crew decided to see whether Borlase’s assertion held water.
At around 4.30pm armed with three handspikes, they set about trying to lever the stone from its pivotal rock. As it would not budge, the men then rocked the stone with such vigour that Goldsmith, fearful that it would fall on to them, gave the command for them to stop. It was too late though and while the stone missed the party, it toppled off its mound and fell some feet, an outcrop of rocks breaking its fall and stopping it from plunging into the sea.
