Qualla: Logan Rock

Logan Rock: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RL Cassady, friend of Mammal4 on en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. In April 1824, a Royal Navy lieutenant named Hugh Goldsmith brought ten or twelve of his crewmates ashore at Treen with crowbars and levers. They climbed up to the headland, set their backs against an eighty-ton granite boulder that had been balanced on a cliff edge for longer than anyone could remember, and pushed. The Logan Rock had rocked, gently and famously, at the touch of a child's hand for centuries. The Cornish antiquarian William Borlase had written in 1754 that no human force could move it from its position. Lieutenant Goldsmith was a nephew of the poet Oliver Goldsmith, and he had decided to disprove the claim. The villagers of Treen, whose tourism economy revolved around that single stone, were about to make him very sorry.

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Image: RL Cassady, friend of Mammal4 on en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Logan Rock: Men Omborth

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Johnson [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. Before the English began calling it a logan, the rock had a Cornish name: Men Omborth, the balanced stone, recorded in 1870 in the slightly mangled form Men Amber. The English word 'logan' is properly pronounced 'logg-un' and probably comes from a dialect verb meaning to rock. In...

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Image: David Johnson [1] | CC BY-SA 3.0

Logan Rock: An Eighty-Ton Trick

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Logan Rock is an 80-ton block of weathered granite, perched on a clifftop edge above Pednvounder Beach on a headland a mile south of Treen. It sits within the ramparts of Treryn Dinas, an Iron Age promontory fort with five lines of defensive earthworks cutting off the seaward...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Logan Rock: Lieutenant Goldsmith's Long Afternoon

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. Hugh Goldsmith and his men were from the cutter HMS Nimble. They were determined, as Goldsmith put it, to demonstrate that nothing was impossible when the courage and skill of British seamen were engaged. Bars and levers worked. The rock slid sideways off its perch and lodged in ...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Logan Rock: Putting It Back

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the dockyard at Plymouth came thirteen capstans, with blocks and chains. The Admiralty contributed twenty-five pounds toward the cost. Davies Gilbert raised more by public subscription. Over months of laborious work, sixty-odd men with block and tackle wrestled the boulder b...

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Image: Tony Atkin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Logan Rock: It Still Rocks

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Champion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Logan Rock still moves, but reluctantly. The anchor holes that the capstans threaded their chains through are visible drilled into the surrounding granite, the way scars become a kind of plaque. Francis Kilvert, the Victorian diarist, visited in July 1870 and noted that it wa...

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Image: Jim Champion | CC BY-SA 3.0