Victoria Cave. 465 



tenanted during, or not long after, the Eoman occupa- 

 tion of Britain. All this comes easily within the range 

 of what may be called modern history. 



Beneath this stratum there lies partly at the en- 

 trance of the cavern an accumulation of angular stones, 

 about six feet thick, at the base of which, resting on grey 

 clay, there occurred charcoal, a bone bead, flint flakes, 

 and broken bones of the Brown Bear, Stag, Horse, and 

 Bos longifrons (Celtic shorthorn). Professor Dawkins 

 guardedly speculates on the date of this human occupa- 

 tion, as having been 6 about 4,000 or 5,000 years ago,' * 

 a moderate computation of a portion of backward time 

 that few will grudge, and which to my mind seems 

 short compared with the earlier history of man and 

 other mammalia in relation to this cavern. 



Beneath these shingly deposits at the entrance of 

 the cave, and * at the base of all the talus ' 2 there was 

 found a genuine glacial Boulder-clay, charged with 

 ice-scratched stones and boulders, consisting of upper 

 Carboniferous black limestone derived from the north, 

 conglomerates from the base of the Carboniferous Lime 

 stone also from the north, while other boulders consisted 

 of Carboniferous sandstones, and 'a very large proportion 

 of Silurian rocks,' the nearest large areas of which 

 are in Cumbria and the south of Scotland. The 

 extent of these Boulder-clays has been proved over an 

 area of 1 ,200 square feet, and this lies upon the edges 

 of deposits of grey clay, and a lower reddish cave- 

 earth, which is a kind of loam peculiar to many bone- 

 caves. The local absence of Boulder-clay on the ground 

 at the top of the cliff, shows that the material could not 

 have fallen from above before the accumulation of the 



1 < Cave Hunting,' p. 115. 



J II. H. Tiddeman, Victoria Cave Exploration Committee, 1875. 

 H H 



