Stanner Rocks
Stanner Rocks is a rounded hill, steep in parts, which lies close to the Wales border with England between Walton and Kington. A superb collection of wild plants can be found here. Where it faces south, warm sunshine and drying winds create an ideal environment for plants which are more likely to be seen around the Mediterranean. The most famous of Stanner Rocks’ specialties is the pretty and elusive Radnor Lily, having small, starry yellow flowers. The Stanner-Hanter Complex refers to the set of rocks which outcrop at Stanner Hill and the nearby Hanter Hill and Worsel Wood and which have long been considered to be the oldest in Wales, having been dated to around 700 million years BP using the rubidium-strontium dating method. They comprise gabbro, diorite and granite. Little modern research has been undertaken on the Complex. The rocks have been variously described as a hypersthene trap (Murchison 1867); an Archean ridge (Calloway1879); a Carboniferous laccolith (Raw 1904); a Tertiary igneous complex (Watts 1906); and a Carboniferous intrusion (Pocock & Whitehead 1935). Holgate & Knight-Hallowes (1941) suggested a Precambrian origin based on the occurrence of dolerite clasts associated with Longmyndian sediments in a nearby quarry. Much of the