Abstract
The Rock Garden, established in 2019, is a geological showcase of both the Institute of Geography and Environmental Sciences of Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce and the entire Kielce region in central Poland. The collection includes specimens of about 50 rocks: those whose outcrops are located in the Holy Cross Mountains region and those brought here from Scandinavia by the ice sheet around 180 to 130 thousand years ago. The Rock Garden is of scientific importance and plays a didactic, conservational, educational, cultural, aesthetic, recreational, and geotouristic role. This article highlights its importance in the development of urban geotourism.
Highlights
All recorded large erratic boulders in Poland are protected by law [1] as monuments of an inanimate nature
In order to minimize the loss of erratic boulders caused by vandals and thieves who are distant from the idea of geodiversity as evidence for the national richness of geological, geomorphological and geographical heritage [32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39], collections are being created in the form of petrographic gardens
50 specimens of rocks from the Holy Cross region and Scandinavian erratics that were brought by ice sheets to the surroundings of Kielce
Summary
All recorded large erratic boulders in Poland are protected by law [1] as monuments of an inanimate nature. Boulder; 51◦ 540 51.300 N and 20◦ 270 15.900 E)—which is from the Miocene age and consists of sandstone cemented by silica It is located in the municipality of Kowiesy in central Poland. Regardless of their size, are protected (due to the lower resistance of such rocks to physical and chemical weathering). The lack of such a provision in the Polish law means that erratic boulders today are objects of increasingly frequent acts of vandalism. The interesting structure and texture (size, shape) of the boulders’ crystals, and often their colour, are the reasons why the boulders have been taken from the landscape Most often, they disappear into private collections and gardens. It cannot be forgotten that the glacial boulders were used to erect megaliths in prehistoric times [15,16] or medieval Romanesque constructions like castles or churches [17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31]
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