CHAP. ix. AT HOXNE, NEAR DISS, SUFFOLK. 167 



flint weapons lay would lead to the persuasion that it was a 

 place of their manufacture, and not of their accidental de 

 posit. Their numbers were so great that the man who carried 

 on the brick- work told me that before he was aware of their 

 being objects of curiosity, he had emptied baskets full of them 

 into the ruts of the adjoining road.' 



Mr. Frere then goes on to explain that the strata in which 

 the flints occur are disposed horizontally, and do not lie at the 

 foot of any higher ground, so that portions of them must have 

 been removed when the adjoining valley was hollowed out. 

 If the author had not mistaken the freshwater shells associated 

 with the tools for marine species, there would have been 

 nothing to correct in his account of the geology of the dis 

 trict, for he distinctly perceived that the strata in which the 

 implements were embedded had, since that time, undergone 

 very extensive denudation.* Specimens of the flint spear 

 heads, sent to London by Mr. Frere, are still preserved in the 

 British Museum, and others are in the collection of the Society 

 of Antiquaries. 



Mr. Prestwich's attention was called by Mr. Evans to those 

 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 re 

 markable 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 seven and the other of ten 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 

 * Frere, Archseologia for 1800, vol. xiii. p. 206. 



