A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE 



man or his handiwork has been found in the caverns and fissures of the 

 carboniferous limestone in the county, but several small cavities in the 

 magnesian limestone at Creswell on the north-eastern border have yielded 

 results unsurpassed in this country, except by those of Kent's Hole at 

 Torquay. The discovery that these cavities contained relics of the past 

 was made by the Rev. J. Magens Mello, M.A., in April, 1875, and this 

 led to his excavation of one of them, a fissure known as the Pin Hole. 

 In this he found, underlying a thin surface soil which contained relics 

 ranging from Roman times to the present, a thick damp sand charged 

 with a multitude of mammalian bones of Pleistocene age. He then 

 proceeded to excavate a neighbouring cavity, known as Robin Hood's 

 Cave, finding there several distinct beds with numerous rude implements 

 associated with these mammalian bones, and overlaid as before with a 

 veneer of surface soil containing ' Recent ' remains. In the following 

 year, 1876, the work was carried on under the auspices of a committee, 

 with Mr. Mello as director, and Professor Boyd Dawkins and the late 

 Mr. Thomas Heath, Curator of the Derby Museum, as superintendents. 

 By the end of the summer, Robin Hood's Cave and another cave, the 

 Church Hole, were thoroughly investigated, with results similar to those 

 of the preceding year. 



The number of bones and implements found during this investiga- 

 tion was enormous. In 1876 2,726 bones and 1,040 implements were 

 obtained from the Pleistocene deposits of Robin Hood's Cave, while 

 from those of the Church Hole the numbers were 1,604 an( ^ 2 34 re ~ 

 spectively. The implements had a general resemblance to those of the 

 same age in Kent's Cavern and many of the continental caves. Those 

 of the lowest beds were of the ' rudest possible construction,' consisting 

 of quartzite pebbles which had been used without any preparation for 

 hammers, crushers and pot-boilers ; or rudely chipped, so as to enable 

 them to be more easily handled ; or the flakes therefrom adapted, by a 

 little additional chipping, for scrapers, knives or hatchets. In the higher 

 (and newer) beds, quartzite was replaced by flint, fabricated into simple 

 forms at first, then more complex as the topmost beds were reached 

 ' well-made lance-heads, chipped on both faces,' and ' delicately-made 

 borers and scrapers,' implements approaching the Solutre type, in fact. 

 With these occurred bone needles, pins, awls and arrow-heads, such as 

 have been found in Kent's Cavern. But the most remarkable object was 

 the incised sketch of the head and forequarters of an unmistakable 

 Pleistocene horse on a piece of flat bone, ' the first trace of pictorial 

 art yet discovered in Great Britain.' The similarity of this Derbyshire 

 drawing and the associated implements to those found in deposits of the 

 same era in Switzerland and Aquitaine ' affords the clearest proof that 

 the hunters of Southern France and Switzerland had found their way 

 along the eastern valley now covered with the waters of the German 

 ocean, and wandered as far north as the borders of Yorkshire.' 



Not only did the investigation prove beyond a doubt the co-exist- 

 ence of man with the migrated and extinct mammals of the Pleistocene, 



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