ON THE LEA VALLEY. I5 



tions, changes such as have been so amply demonstrated there 

 come to be looked upon as mere abstract possibilities which may 

 safely be disregarded in practice. 



APPENDIX I. 

 Lake-Dwellings in the Lea Marshes. 



I have mentioned that a close association between the 

 existence of dug-out canoes and that of primitive lake-dwellings 

 has been observed. Of course there is no necessary connection 

 between them, and in all probability there was never anything 

 that cculd be called a lake in the Lea Valley from Broxbourne 

 southward. But there were probably on the Lea marshes, in 

 primitive times, houses of the kind mentioned b}' Munro in The 

 Lake Dwellings of Europe, p. 553. He says : — 



" A reference to Lake Dwellings occurs in a passage by 

 Hippocrates {Be Eribiis, &c. XXXVII) : — ' Concerning the 

 people of the Phasis, that region is marshy and hot, and full of 

 water and woody ; . . . . The inhabitants live in the 

 marshes and have houses of timber and of reeds constructed in 

 the midst of the waters ; and they seldom go out to the city or 

 the market, but sail up and down in boats made out of a solid 

 tree trunk, for there are numerous canals in that region ' [This 

 locality is east of the Black Sea.]" 



The sections displayed in the reservoir excavations show 

 frequent changes in the main channel of the Lea, and suggest the 

 existence of many backwaters, or partly deserted channels, in 

 which water-loving plants grew, leaving beds more or less peaty 

 for our inspection to-day. The Lea Marshes would therefore 

 afford many positions either wholly surrounded by water or easily 

 made insular, a? sites for pile dwellings. As when (for example) 

 we traverse the hilly parts of the Chalk, and seldom, if ever, find 

 a naturally strong site unoccupied by an ancient camp of refuge, 

 so we may fairly conclude that eligible sites on marshes for pile- 

 dwellings would not, in primitive times, remain unused. To 

 come to a later period than that of dug-out canoes, we find the 

 Lea shown, in Norden's Map of Essex (1594) as having two or 

 more channels of apparently equal importance all the way from 

 Broxbourne to Blackwall, the other rivers marked on the map 

 having but one channel, except that the Thames, as at the 

 present day, has many around Canvey Island. 



It seems therefore highly probable that the pre- Roman users 

 of dug-out canoes on the Lea lived in pile-dwellings on the 



