Seven Stones Reef

The Seven Stones is a rocky reef of fine grained granite nearly 15 miles west of Land's End, Cornwall, and about 7 miles east-northeast of the Isles of Scilly, forming part of the Cornubian batholith and spanning nearly 2 miles long by about 1 mile wide with seven or eight peaks that break the surface at varying states of the tide. The granite formed in the Early Permian period, roughly 300 to 275 million years ago, during the late stages of the Variscan mountain-building event, and rises from water around 60 fathoms deep. The reef has wrecked an estimated 200 vessels, 71 of them named, and has been marked by a lightvessel, now an automated weather station, since 1841; its most notorious wreck was the supertanker Torrey Canyon in 1967, which spilled 860,000 barrels of crude oil in what is still the worst oil spill on record in United Kingdom waters.