Looking for the Ramson Cliff Erratic in 1940 - the film

The Ramson Cliff boulder has had me hooked for over a year now (the mystery, the 2025 visit, the second thin section and last month's post), and the full story is in the paper in Quaternary Newsletter 167. One question kept nagging at me. The stone was found in 1969 at SS 4356 4070, out in the field on Baggy Point, and moved to the field edge in the early 1970s. Was it already sitting there in 1940, and would a wartime aerial photograph show it?

So I flew in to have a look, using a Luftwaffe reconnaissance photograph taken over North Devon in the summer of 1940.

How I made it

The photographs come from Luftwaffe sortie GX 10006 SD, flown on 31 August 1940. Each frame has the camera's clock photographed in the corner. The clock in the neighbouring frame reads 12:45 BST, which puts the frame over the find spot at about the same moment. I lined the frames up against the modern map, tightening the fit around Baggy Point using the field banks that show on the Environment Agency LiDAR. Then I stitched them into a mosaic and flew a virtual camera in from the south over Croyde, descending and tilting down until it looks straight down on the target.

On the approach: the 1940 fields of Baggy Point, built from sortie GX 10006 SD.

The limit is resolution. The National Archives scans of these frames come out at about 1.5 m per pixel on the ground. The boulder is 105 x 55 x 38 cm and weighs 378 kg, so it is smaller than a single pixel. I never expected to see the stone itself. What I was looking for were the things a big stone in a field does to the land around it: livestock tracks converging on it, a trampled or poached patch, ploughing that bends round it, or an unploughed island left where the plough couldn't go.

Over the target: the circle marks the 1969 find spot, SS 4356 4070, on the 31 August 1940 photograph.

What it shows

Honestly, nothing. In 1940 the find spot lies in a strip of grass inside the cliff-top boundary. With the contrast pushed up there are no tracks running to it, no worn patch, and no sign of cultivation avoiding it. The other photographs I have looked at, GX 11967 (23 March 1941) and RAF 106G/LA/132 (14 February 1945), are no clearer. That doesn't prove the stone wasn't there: a stone smaller than a pixel in a grass field could easily leave no trace. But the wartime air photos can't settle it either way.

The film ends on the LiDAR, which picks out the cliff-top field edge where the stone sits today.

Credits

Aerial photographs: US National Archives, Record Group 373. LiDAR: Environment Agency, contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.