[19. Antiquities.]
To the archaeologist and the antiquarian Devonshire is one of the most interesting counties in England. With the exception of Cornwall no other district is so rich in relics of the ancient inhabitants of Britain; and it was from the caves of this county that Pengelly obtained that clear evidence of the extreme antiquity of man in this island which proved that he lived here, unnumbered ages back, when such animals as the cave-lion, the hyaena, and the mammoth ran wild in what we now call England.
Palaeolithic Flint Implement
(From Kent's Cavern)
The people who inhabited Britain before the coming of the Romans are said to have belonged to the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, or the Iron Age, according to the material which they used for their tools and weapons; and the first of these epochs is further divided into the Earlier and the Later Stone Ages, or the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Periods. The implements of the former were very roughly fashioned of chipped, unpolished flint; those of the latter were more skilfully made, and were sometimes very highly finished.
Relics of all these periods have been found in Devonshire, but it is not always possible to say to which age a particular weapon or implement belongs. The use of flint for arrow-heads, for example, certainly continued long after the invention of bronze; and bronze was employed, especially for ornaments, long after iron had come into regular use.
Traces of Palaeolithic man are nowhere common, and they are rare in Devonshire; but they have been found, in the shape of massive tools of roughly chipped flint, in Kent's Cavern near Torquay, in the Cattedown Cave, now destroyed, near Plymouth, and in the river-drift near Axminster. Very fine examples have been obtained from a ballast-pit at Broome.