(FIGURE 24. SECTION SHOWING THE POSITION OF THE FLINT WEAPONS
AT HOXNE, NEAR DISS, SUFFOLK.
See Prestwich "Philosophical Transactions" Plate 11 1860.)
1. Gravel of Gold Brook, a tributary of the Waveney.
2. Higher-level gravel overlying the freshwater deposit.
3 and 4. Sand and gravel, with freshwater shells, and
flint implements, and bones of mammalia.
5. Peaty and clayey beds, with same fossils.
6. Boulder clay or glacial drift.
7. Sand and gravel below boulder clay.
8. Chalk with flints.)
Mr. Prestwich's attention was called by Mr. Evans to these weapons, as well as to Mr. Frere's memoir after his return from Amiens in 1859, and he lost no time in visiting Hoxne, a village five miles eastward of Diss. It is not a little remarkable that he should have found, after a lapse of sixty years, that the extraction of clay was still going on in the same brick-pit. Only a few months before his arrival, two flint instruments had been dug out of the clay, one from a depth of 7 and the other of 10 feet from the surface. Others have since been disinterred from undisturbed beds of gravel in the same pit. Mr. Amyot of Diss has also obtained from the underlying freshwater strata the astragalus of an elephant, and bones of the deer and horse; but although many of the old implements have recently been discovered in situ in regular strata and preserved by Sir Edward Kerrison, no bones of extinct mammalia seem as yet to have been actually seen in the same stratum with one of the tools.
By reference to the annexed section, the geologist will see that the basin-shaped hollow a, b, c has been filled up gradually with the freshwater strata 3, 4, 5, after the same cavity a, b, c had been previously excavated out of the more ancient boulder clay Number 6. The relative position of these formations will be better understood when I have described in the twelfth chapter the structure of Norfolk and Suffolk as laid open in the sea-cliffs at Mundesley, about 30 miles distant from Hoxne, in a north-north-east direction.
I examined the deposits at Hoxne in 1860, when I had the advantage of being accompanied by the Reverend J. Gunn and the Reverend S.W. King. In the loamy beds 3 and 4, Figure 24, we observed the common river shell Valvata piscinalis in great numbers. With it, but much more rare, were Limnaea palustris, Planorbis albus, P. Spirorbis, Succinea putris, Bithynia tentaculata, Cyclas cornea; and Mr. Prestwich mentions Cyclas amnica and fragments of a Unio, besides several land shells. In the black peaty mass Number 5, fragments of wood of the oak, yew, and fir have been recognised. The flint weapons which I have seen from Hoxne are so much more perfect, and have their cutting edge so much sharper than those from the valley of the Somme, that they seem neither to have been used by Man, nor to have been rolled in the bed of a river. The opinion of Mr. Frere, therefore, that there may have been a manufactory of weapons on the spot, appears probable.
FLINT IMPLEMENTS AT ICKLINGHAM IN SUFFOLK.
In another part of Suffolk, at Icklingham, in the valley of the Lark, below Bury St. Edmund's, there is a bed of gravel, in which teeth of Elephas primigenius and several flint tools, chiefly of a lance-head form, have been found. I have twice visited the spot, which has been correctly described by Mr. Prestwich.*
(* "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" volume 17
1861, page 364.)
The section of the Bedford tool-bearing alluvium, given in Figure 23, may serve to illustrate that of Icklingham, if we substitute Chalk for Oolite, and the river Lark for the Ouse. In both cases, the present bed of the river is about 30 feet below the level of the old gravel, and the Chalk hill, which bounds the valley of the Lark on the right side, is capped like the Oolite of Biddenham by boulder clay, which rises to the height of 100 feet above the Lark. About twelve years ago, a large erratic block, above 4 feet in diameter, was dug out of the boulder clay at Icklingham, which I found to consist of a hard siliceous schist, which must have come from a remote region. The tool-bearing gravel here, as in the case to which it has been compared near Bedford, is proved to be newer than the glacial drift, by containing pebbles of basalt and other rocks derived from that formation.