Vanishing point US state's symbol crumbles away

His craggy profile had inspired poets, attracted tourists and been featured on the back of the American quarter. But now the Old Man of the Mountain, the most famous landmark in New Hampshire, is no more, with apparently with no witnesses to the historic departure.

After dominating the horizon in the White Mountains for centuries, the granite rock formation crumbled and fell over the weekend, a victim of time and a hellish winter.

The uncanny likeness to a human profile, complete with the sort of jaw that would have won him a role as a Hollywood action hero, had turned the Old Man into a symbol of the state, which carries the likeness on its car number plates.

The profile attracted generations of tourists to the area and no visit to Franconia Notch state park was complete without a photograph of the Old Man, standing 1,200 feet above Profile Lake.

Believed to have existed in that form for up to 10,000 years, the Old Man was first described in 1805. The 19th century poet and orator Daniel Webster decided that "God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that in New England He makes men". Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne immortalised him in The Great Stone Face.

For years, the Old Man had given hints of his mortality as small chunks of his features tumbled down. He had been patched up with an in tricate array of cables and glues and the proud nose and jutting chin had always survived. The latest collapse cannot be addressed even by the most mountainous of cosmetic surgery.

"We always thought it was the hand of God holding him up and he let go," said a state parks spokesman.