The Limeslade erratic "conspiracy"

As we have noted before, certain people with strong vested interests seem to have convinced themselves that there is some great conspiracy going on, designed to keep "the truth about the Limeslade erratic" away from the eyes of the world.  Perhaps we should rephrase that and say "away from their eyes in particular"...........

Our old friend Tim Daw has put up another post on his blog about this "large erratic deposited on a rocky coast by an ice floe" -- celebrating the fact that two years have now passed since Phil Holden discovered the erratic in the winter of 2022.  

https://www.sarsen.org/2024/01/the-limeslade-bay-erratic-discovery.html

He has even composed a moving poem in celebration of his paranoia.  Rob Ixer prefers to comment on the Megalithic Portal, and accuses me of suppressing information that should by now be out in the public domain.  "The silence is deafening", he says with glee.

I am touched by their concern and at the same time greatly entertained. Why I should wish to suppress anything is a complete mystery to me, as I explained in a previous post (14 August 2023):

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-limeslade-erratic-boulder-probably.html

It would be interesting to discover the origin of the boulder, but I have no interest whatsoever in hoping for one source rather than another. It is probably not from Mynydd Preseli, and is most probably from one of the North Pembs dolerite outcrops.  Carn Goedog and Rhosyfelin can be ruled out as source locations.  That's as much as we know, following the pXRF and thin section studies.  They are being incorporated in a short paper, and will be published in due course.

From the outset we have been hamstrung by the lack of access to research funding, and so we have had to depend on offers of help from elsewhere.  Dr Katie Preece of Swansea University originally offered to help with the sample analyses, but in the event was unable to find the time.  Prof Tim Darvill and Dr Steve Parry kindly offered to analyse the samples provided by Phil Holden, but they are both very busy men with other research priorities.  The samples were sent off to them in the spring of 2022.  There were instrument breakdowns, calibration issues and other external factors that led to further delays, but we were in no position to complain since we were entirely dependent on the goodwill of others.  I'm not going to criticise anybody.  But rest assured that Phil and I have, on many occasions, been very frustrated by the delays!   Sometimes life gets in the way of things, and research schedules fall by the wayside.  But to flag up the idea that there is some sort of "conspiracy of silence" is both absurd and disrespectful.

Messrs Ixer and Daw seem to think that the interpretation of the Limeslade Boulder find is much ado about nothing.  Let me assure them that it is important, as we indicated in the original press release.  It shows that during at least one glacial episode, ice from the west (carrying erratics most probably from North Pembrokeshire) was powerful enough to impinge on the Gower coast, as suggested by others including Prof Peter Kokelaar.  On present evidence, it's the biggest Pembrokeshire erratic found on the Bristol Channel coast.  We now know that the ice stream responsible was more powerful than ice issuing from the Welsh Ice cap and through the South Wales valleys.  In turn, this suggests that the Irish Sea ice stream must have progressed far up the Bristol Channel --and confirms previous conclusions based on  the finds of erratics on Flatholm and in the Bristol area.  It shows that the entrainment and transport of large blocks of igneous rock actually happened in West Wales.  And it shows that ice on the bed of the ice stream was capable of entraining blocks of stone from multiple locations, not exactly at random but when the right combinations of circumstances occurred on the glacier bed. 

This boulder has helped us to make significant progress.  But some researchers have their own private agendas and belief systems, and will do whatever it takes to minimise the importance of anything they find inconvenient.  And some of them rush into print on the flimsiest of evidence, and then later have to admit to the world that much of what they said was nonsense........