The Merton Stone - Norfolk and Britains largest glacial erratic boulder

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The Merton Stones - glacial erractic or found where its formed?



The Merton Stone is Norfolk and perhaps Britains largest glacial erratic boulder. Found in a Marl pit or depression outside the village of Merton it is a puzzling glacial erractic. For a Gravity Universe.

Norfolk is meant to be its own glacial erratic land, created by glacial retreat, with similar sand/stones to skandi land countries. The Merton Stone though is meant to be similar to Yorkshire or Northern England geology.



hoba meteorite - no crater?


Perhaps the Merton Stone was formed where it lays. Just below the surface. The same as the largest meteorite remains we have found on Earth. Iron meteorites are found on or just below the surface. With no impact crater. How can the largest meteorites found, over 60 tonnes some of them, leave no impact crater. One may be allowed but all of them?

Are they glacial erractic meteorites or are they formed where they are found. Are they not meteorites?

Another fact to notice is that the area is called Rocklands. Nowadays there are no rocks to be seen but you do not get a name like that, in a land of chalk for no reason. Were these other rocks also created by Electric Universe events. If not then these rocks had to also have been glacial erratics.

The Church at Merton is a very fine old Church with some remarkably carvings. It also has one of the finest secret views in Norfolk around its back. Well worth a visit if you are in the area.

If it is dry you can even drive down the outside of the field to get to the Merton Stone, although it is only a 5 to 10 minute walk from the top of the field.


Shrieking Pits of Norfolk



The area aound Merton has a number of shrieking pits. These could either be spotting holes from an Electric Universe event (EDM) to cause the holes or they could have been dug to recover whatever minerals were created there by it.
Although these pits are said to be iron age diggings, and they maybe, it is not the fact that they are diggings it is why have they dug at these spots? Why not everywhere? What has caused "stuff" to be there in the first place?

Near Beeston Bump (Beeston Regis) they are known as Hills and Holes

These shallow pits are found all over Norfolk but are easily missed as they have now turned into small ponds.


The Merton Stone - article and photographs


The Merton Stone - glacial erratics and glacial erratic meteorites


Photographs of the Merton Stone glacial erratic and Iron meteorites that leave no crater

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The Merton Stone (Glacial erractic?)- Hidden East Anglia

Merton: The Merton Stone

The 'Merton Stone' is to be found near the western boundary of the parish with Threxton, just off Peddar's Way near an area marked as Capp's Bush,  at grid reference TL895991. It is supposed to be a huge boulder of Necomian sandstone, 12 feet x 5 feet x 5 feet, lying in a marl pit with only the tip currently showing. According to the legend, if it were removed, "all the waters would rise and cover the whole earth".1

I have an addition to this tale from a Merton inhabitant, who says "My grandfather, the 5th Lord Walsingham, who was a very enquiring sort of man, got all the men (and women apparently) together, with ropes (and, I've no doubt, much beer) to try and move it. The attempt failed, but the tradition is that it was followed by an 'erotic debauch'; and even in my own boyhood, someone would say of some elderly love-child 'Ah, he's wun o' them wot cum the toime o' the ould stoon'."2 (See a similar tale under Hartest, Suffolk).

The area of the twin villages to the south-east is known as the Rocklands, possibly, according to one antiquarian, from large boulders that stood there, like the one at Merton.

There seems to be some dispute over the stone's composition: "One of the natural curiosities in Merton is a huge boulder, thought to weigh about 20 tonnes, lying in a field on the west side of the parish. This massive boulder was swept to its present position by the ice during the last glacial period. It is believed to be the largest of its kind in Britain. It was described by Sir Robert Murchison as "...belonging to the Oxford Oolite, i.e., either to the clay or the band of drift called the calcareous grit. It contains the Ammonites duncani. It is likely to have been transported in the glacial period from the Bora district of Sutherland". Mr. Esteridge of the Geological Museum, however, differed in his interpretation saying "It is from the calcareous grit of the Oxford clay, a boulder from Yorkshire, enclosing Ammonites lamberti"."3

Sources:
1. W. G. Clarke: 'In Breckland Wilds' (Robert Scott, 1925), pp.164, 188.
2. Information from the Hon. Richard de Grey of Merton
3. Former weblink: wayland.org.uk/site/site/mertonhistory
The Merton Stone - Hidden East Anglia

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A tale told to me when visiting the Merton Stone is that back in the old days they tried to remove it using a steam powered Threshing machine. The machine being the most powerful engine in the area. They attached various ropes to the Merton Stone and hoped to dislodge it using the steam engine. Unfortunately one of the ropes snapped, killing one of the chaps and also the steam Thresher got stuck.

The field is known to old locals as the Threshing or Thresher Field due to these events.

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St. Peter's church, Merton and the Merton Stone

St. Peter's, Merton is a small, flint church with a round west tower. It was largely rebuilt around 1300; most of the windows with their very elaborate tracery date from this period, with some later, Perpendicular, additions. The tower, however, and some parts of the west and north walls may be Saxon or early Norman. Considerable restoration was carried out in the nineteenth century but, with some notable exceptions (particularly the South Porch), efforts were made to ensure that new stonework and other features were a replica of that which was being replaced. Within the last few years further restoration work has taken place, with funding from the English Heritage, The Norfolk Churches Trust and The Round Tower Churches Society.

Location and Early History

The church stands on an abrupt rise in the ground that is probably glacial in origin. Another interesting relic of the Ice Age in the parish is the "Merton Stone," a very large "glacial erratic" (that is, a large boulder that has been carried by the ice far from its place of origin). According to local legend, if the Merton Stone is moved, the village will flood - but since the stone is estimated to weigh about twenty tons, this is unlikely to happen!

The stone lies about a mile to the northwest of the church, near to the ancient track way called Peddar's Way. Evidence of early human occupation has been found near Peddar's Way and elsewhere in the parish; ranging from Prehistoric flint artefacts to numerous Roman finds, as well as Saxon and medieval remains.

The church is reached by passing through the main gates into Merton Park. This is part of the estate of the de Grey family, who have held the manor of Merton since the early fourteenth century when Sir Thomas de Grey of Cornard, Suffolk, married Isabell Baynard. Isabell was one of three sisters, co-heirs of Sir Fulk Baynard, whose ancestor Ralph Baynard had been given Merton by William the Conqueror after the Norman Conquest.
St. Peter's, Merton - watton .info

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Charles Lyell’s “The Principles of Geology" and the Merton Stone

(Charles Lyell’s “The Principles of Geology”)... the references to the shells dating the rocks are frequent; and the Merton Stone,and the Merton Stone, previously unknown, also features as evidence of the shaping of the land by glaciation.  The stone, the largest glacial erratic so far discovered in the United Kingdom, weighing an estimated twenty to thirty tons, was dug up in the seventeenth century in Merton when we were digging for marl (clay) to spread on the light soil to increase water retention and so fertility.  The clay is under some fifteen feet of sand with (now) two to three feet of fertile soil on top, mostly due to cultivations.  Marl comes from ma-lai, mud-looping in modern English idiom, binding the soil for water retention.  It is clay used for the purpose, to glue (a word closely akin) the soil.

Marling was used in the following century all across Norfolk to consolidate the soil to provide the increased fertility permitting the Norfolk Four Course Rotation developed by Cooke and Townshend which revolutionized farming and indirectly led to the population increase which started the industrial revolution when sturdy beggars surplus to employment in farming moved to the towns.  Too dirty to be taken into the cottage industries in the cottages of the industrious they were employed instead in garden sheds, because they might be trusted to cut out a sole after sufficient instruction but hardly to stitch a shoe.  The professional cobblers indoors did the cobbling.  The division of labour and factory manufacture followed.

The technical innovators rightly get the credit for industrial progress but it only takes a few drinks to persuade the present author his family triggered the lot!  Britain got ahead in industry because these sturdy beggars were put to work in spite of their stink.  On the continent they were left unemployed beggars.  Was that the British head start?  It was not that on this island folk were naturally nicer.  They weren’t and aren’t.  It was the channel which had mostly saved them from warfare at home since 1066 which enabled them to empathise with the unfortunate.  On the continent empathy had been knocked out of them by repetitive bloodshed, rape and pillage.  Folk had sharpened each other by confrontation.  We are islanders and should remain so.

Lyell, a frequent visitor to Merton, claimed the Merton stone had been carried on the glaciers from New Galloway in the South West corner of Scotland, but later the President of the Geological Society, Lyell’s colleague Sir Roderick Murchison, preferred West Yorkshire with a similar signature from the molusca, saving climbing the Pennine hills.
Charles Lyell’s “The Principles of Geology" and the Merton Stone - ontheoriginsofspeaking .com

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Merton Boulder and the Gyrotiller

Below is a quote from the great little site (if you are into Merton that is!) called Old Merton that also has stories of Black Shuck (the inspiration for the Hound of the Baskervilles) and other ghostly Norfolk stories from Merton

gyrotiller diesel engine and the Merton Boulder

To the West of Merton Green just off the peddars way, Where In a tiny pit rests a boulder which swepted to its present place by the ice in the last glacial period. It is said to be the largest of its kind in Norfolk and possibly Britain. The boulder also holds a history of Mystical source, I have been told by many People, personal experience's, some with handed down stories that when standing on the stone One feels an ice cold feel together with a feeling of some kind of Unexplainable spiritual presents.
It is said if this stone is removed all the waters will rise and flood the village and beyond.
The 7th Baron gathered together some men and attempted to move the stone with ropes and horses and failed in their task.
I have been told by an old farm worker from the estate that they too had made attempts later to move the stone using more modern equipment,With the use of the Gyrotiller, again this became a failed effort, The whole episode ended in one of the gyrotillers became well and truly bogged in, It then had taken two others to pull the unit out of its bog, apparently something never heard of before.
The Gyrotiller (below), was an early form of mechanical cultivator,which ran on tracks and had two sets of rotating blades at the rear. There is only one working Gyrotiller in the world which was made in 1934.
Merton Boulder and the Gyrotiller | merton.ukgo.com