And down came the cliff...... Traeth Mawr, Newport

The rockfall scar and, beneath it, a cone of thousands of tonnes of debris.

You don't often see evidence of major cliff-falls and realignments of the coast in Pembrokeshire, but when you are least expecting it, catastrophic rockfalls happen.  When we went for a walk in the winter sunshine on Newport beach this morning, we discovered this huge rockfall.  It's  just a few days old, since the soil and vegetation brought down is sitting low on the debris cone where it would have been washed away by waves if the fall had occurred before the last spring tide.  The scar is clearly visible on the cliff face, and the cone has a height of c 10m and a front edge on a semicircle, about 30m from one cliff contact to the other.

The rockfall is near the northern extremity of Newport Sands -- Traeth Mawr. Approx grid reference: SN054408.   The rocks are Ordcovician shales and sandstones, severely folded, faulted and smashed up -- so it is no surprise that the cliffs here are notoriously unstable. The reddish / ochre colour of the rocks now exposed on the scar shows that that there has been severe water penetration and weathering some metres in from the old cliff face. I suspect that the rockfall occurred during recent very wet weather, maybe with waves pounding the base of the cliff providing adequate percussion and vibrations in the rock mass for the surface layers to detach themselves and crash down onto the beach.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on this rockfall and to see just how long it will take for the cone to be altered, reduced in size and eventually removed altogether -- which it will be.

Another view of the rockfall cone

Contact between the edge of the cone and the old cliffline

Turf and scrub vegetation which has fallen from the clifftop onto the surface of the new cone.  If there had been any spring tides since the rockfall, this material would have had all the fines washed out and may well have been removed entirely.