Rock Rewilding reaches eleven returned boulders.

An adolescent glacial erratic — estimated weight 4.3 tonnes, syenite-granite, displaced approximately 280 metres during 1974 road-widening works — has been returned to within forty metres of its surveyed original deposition site. This is the eleventh boulder returned under the Rock Rewilding programme, and the heaviest to date.

We are candid that "forty metres" is a meaningful margin. The original deposition site is now partially under tarmac; we returned the boulder to the nearest geologically coherent position upslope. The geologist who advised on the relocation described the result as “an honest approximation,” which we accept as a fair characterisation. We do not claim restoration; we claim restitution toward.

Eleven returns is a small number by any measure. We have always described Rock Rewilding as a pilot, with the explicit understanding that the per-boulder cost is high and the welfare benefit, if any, is contested. Our continuing case for the programme rests less on its aggregate impact and more on what it teaches us — about logistics, about geological coherence as a welfare-adjacent concept, and about what operators are willing to accept when a returned boulder shows up at a former extraction site.

Funders, to whom we account, will find an itemised cost breakdown in the Q2 financial appendix, available on request. The marginal cost per boulder remains an order of magnitude above what we would consider sustainable at scale. We do not currently intend to scale.