DEEPDALE CAVE. 77 



plentiful enough on Roman sites. How numerous the " finds " 

 have been the reader may judge for himself, all the fibulre and 

 other bronze objects in the collotype in the last volume, besides 

 many others of iron, etc., were found within an area of eight 

 square yards, rather nearer the bottom of the valley than the cave. 

 Mr. Salt assures me that in this area the number of potsherds he 

 noticed was about thirty in every square yard. An important 

 feature was the even distribution of these various objects, ihus 

 proving (as this gentleman points out) that the coins, brooches, 

 and other more valuable finds, must not be regarded as hoards, 

 but as accidentally dropped at various times and thus lost. None 

 have been found below the thick sheet of stalagmite in the cave, 

 but outside they occurred at a depth of five or even six feet. The 

 Roman coin. No. i, plate ix., was found at a depth of five feet, 

 and at six feet fragments of coarse pottery have just been turned 

 up. An equally noteworthy point was the comparative thinness 

 of the post-Roman mould. So far as I could make out this did 

 not exceed a few inches ; indeed, Mr. Salt, in describing his 

 excavations, quite ignored it. 



The similarity of the deposits within this cave with the super- 

 ficial ones of the famous Kent's Cavern at Torquay is most 

 striking. In a lecture by the late Mr. Pengelly (whose name is 

 so intimately connected with the excavation of that cave), delivered 

 at the Hulme Town Hall, Manchester, in 1872, he thus described 

 the latter : — " Beneath and between these blocks (blocks of stone 

 on the floor) was a black material, which we call black mould, 

 consisting of vegetable debris to a large extent, and which covered 

 the cavern in every direction to a depth of three inches to a foot 

 or more. Below that was the stalagmite, varying in thickness 

 from an inch to upwards of five feet, but on an average from 

 sixteen to twenty inches thick. In one particular part of the 

 cavern there was under this floor a layer called the black band, 

 covering a space of one hundred square feet, and consisting 

 mainly of charcoal. Below that we have what we call the cave- 

 earth, which we excavated to a depth of four feet. It is a light 

 red loam, and with it there were mixed up about fifty per cent, of 



