456 T. V. Holmes — On Deneholes and Bell Pits. 



sand covered the Chalk. All the pits were filled up to within 

 4 feet of the surface. " This seems to have been done," he says, 

 " by throwing into an open shaft the waste materials taken out of 

 one or more pits in course of being excavated." The object in this 

 case was the extraction of flint ; that from a band at the bottom 

 being of specially good quality for the manufacture of implements. 

 This band being reached, the flint on the floor was removed, and 

 galleries about 3 feet high and from 4 feet to 7 feet wide were 

 driven in various directions, and the flint in them extracted till 

 the shafts were more or less connected together by means of these 

 galleries. 



Similar workings in Chalk for flint were those at Cissbury, near 

 Worthing, which have been explored by Lieut.-General Pitt-Rivers, 

 Mr. Park Harrison, and others. Mr. Spurrell, in the paper which 

 I have already mentioned, says that at Cissbury the shafts varied in 

 depth from 17 feet to 42 feet. The width of the simplest shaft 

 decreased from 18 feet at the top to 4 ft. 6 in. at the bottom, but 

 other shafts were sunk with terraces and burrows at various depths 

 as seams of flint were cleared out and followed. 



Passing from the Chalk, we have mines of a similar kind in the 

 well-known Pen Pits, near Stourhead, on the borders of Wiltshire 

 and Somerset. Here on a promontory of a plateau of Upper 

 Greensand, there are hundreds of cup-shaped hollows varying in 

 diameter from 10 to 20 feet and in depth from 5 to 10 feet. 

 Lieut.-General Pitt-Eivers examined some of them, which he found 

 had been used as mines, to a band of stone lying a few feet below 

 the surface, which was suitable for querns, etc. It had been thought 

 by an eminent antiquary that the Pen Pits were the site of an 

 ancient British village. But against this view there is not only the 

 fact that stone has certainly been procured from these pits, but there 

 is another point which has hardly received the attention it deserves. 

 Similar workings are visible on the same horizon on the other side 

 of a valley too broad and deep to allow of all of them having formed 

 part of the same village. 



The pits in Purbeck stone, described by Mr. Dawson in the 

 Geological Magazine for July, seem to have a strong general re- 

 semblance to the workings in Chalk for flint at Cissbury and Grime's 

 Graves, and to the Pen Pits of Stourhead. In all these cases the 

 concentration of the pits is a natural result of the fact that whether 

 a narrow band of stone or a particular seam of flint was required, 

 the seekers have felt it necessary to keep in touch with it. In each 

 instance we have a vertical shaft of no great depth but of con- 

 siderable breadth, from the bottom of which a widening out takes 

 place, the details varying with the stability of the rock, the pro- 

 portion required for removal, etc. At Grime's Graves galleries 

 connect the shafts; in no case can this be objectionable in mines 

 except on the score of stability. And at Grime's Graves, as in 

 Mr. Dawson's Purbeck pits, we find that the debris from a new 

 shaft goes to fill up an old one. This of course becomes necessary 

 when so small a proportion of the rock in which the excavations are 



