The first Sunday of  Earth Science Week is International Earthcache Day (sounds all very American to me !) a day when cachers celebrate by going out and finding an Earthcache. These are not like other caches in that there is no box and/or logbook, all there is is a geographical location of some educational value, and to claim the cache you have to learn about the place and write down the answers to some questions and send them off in an email to the cache setter (never put them down in the log) to prove you have ‘learnt’ something about the Earth… I must say I find the idea of having to look up and email answers a bit tedious so I often just put down a comic answer in my log and leave it at that… 

14th October 2012 – Great Almscliff Crag GC3XAEE – cache #2091
Even though this was a new Earthcache that was only 4 miles form home and had been published 10 days earlier, I like everyone else it seems had been saving this to do on International Earthcache Day, and fortunately the day started with blue sky and sunshine which made it a nice place to go for a Sunday morning stroll.

The Earthcache asked for the two possibilities on how this large lump of Rock had been formed, and why it was stuck up in the middle of the landscape… the answers to which were on the noticeboard at the cache site… my log was as follows

‘Forget what the ‘scientists’ say on the notice board – the formation of the crag goes back to the day of giants, when Rombald lived in this part of the world. It was then very different to the landscape seen here today, in those days the area was just a big bog, so Rombald threw a large rock into the bog to use as a stepping stone, the rock that is today Almscliffe Crag. The story goes that Rombald was striding from this stepping stone to the top if Ilkley Moor some seven miles away when he caught his foot on another rock – the Cow, and split off the Calf.
The other possibility for Almscliffe Crag’s formation was shown on TV in January 1980 when the crag appeared as the title object in the Blakes 7 episode ‘Volcano’ (Series 3 Episode 3) This was exciting at the time as one of the big TV shows of the time was filming near us !
However this second possibility is a lot less likely to be true than the first (as of course the crag is made of sedimentary not igneous rock)’