448 T. V. Hohnes — On DenehoUs and Bell Pits. 



for a reply. For though our views do not appear to be injuriously 

 affected by Mr. Dawson's remarks, yet as the Denehole Report is 

 now more than ten years old it is probable that few of the readers 

 of the Geological Magazine have both seen and remember it. 

 And the impression which the reader would derive from Mr. Dawson's 

 article is, that his Bell Pit hypothesis is something quite new, and 

 therefore unnoticed by us, whereas it was an old view before the 

 Eeport was written, having been put forward by the late Eoach 

 Smith in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1867 ; and an account of 

 workings for chalk, of the kind described by Mr. Dawson, written 

 by Mr. F. J. Bennett, of the Geological Survey, is appended to 

 the Denehole Eeport. 



The name 'denehole' is said by the highest authority, that of 

 Dr. J. A. H. Murray, to mean danehole, not cZenhole, as we supposed 

 when the Eeport was written. Of course, this etymological question 

 concerns us here only as throwing light on the traditional view as 

 to the makers of these pits. So far as the name goes it divides 

 these pits somewhat more decidedly from primitive mines than 

 denhole would do. For danehole implies not merely a hiding-place, 

 but a hiding-place from the last and best remembered of the piratical 

 invaders of our shores, though it by no means excludes the possibility 

 that daneholes may have been useful in the time of earlier marauders. 

 On the other hand, as the late Eoach Smith pointed out, pits for 

 chalk, of the class described by Mr. Bennett and by Mr. Dawson, 

 are mentioned by Pliny. It would seem, therefore, that both 

 classes of pits, the deneholes and the bell pits, were known many 

 centuries ago. But while collections of bell pits, such as Grime's 

 Graves and the Pen Pits, have received various local names, the 

 name denehole seems to have been applied only to excavations which, 

 in the popular view, could hardly have been made for anything 

 but hiding-places. Excavations made for the sake of the material 

 extracted, and excavations made for the sake of the space so obtained 

 for some domestic purpose, are both common throughout the world. 

 Whether any given group of pits should be classed as belonging to 

 the danehole or the bell-pit division is purely a matter of the 

 evidence in each case, that afforded by their sites and construction 

 being the most decisive. For gravel obtained from the site of 

 a new town-hall is utilized as much as that from a gravel-pit 

 on a common, though the makers of each excavation had very 

 different purposes in view. And the mere presence or absence 

 of human implements is, in itself, of little weight. At the 

 present day they may usually be found most abundantly, 

 not in ruined dwellings, but in disused gravel-pits and deserted 

 brickyards. 



The mode in which any people make excavations in a rock 

 evidently depends partly on the position and nature of the rock, 

 partly on the nature of the tools and appliances known to them. 

 And we should not expect to find among a primitive people the 

 immense variety of form in structures or excavations for different 

 purposes which might be looked for in more advanced countries. 



