A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE 
of Recent alluvium usually flanked on either side by Pleistocene gravel 
forming a bed from Io to 20 feet thick resting on Oolitic strata at a 
considerably higher level than the present surface of the river. Between 
Felmersham and Bedford the river is very sinuous, below Oakley the 
gravel exceeds a mile in width, and below Bedford its width exceeds 
2 miles, in places extending to 4 miles. At Tempsford, where the 
Ivel joins the Ouse, the bed of gravel narrows to about a mile in width. 
The Ivel and the Hiz have formed similar but less extensive beds of 
gravel along their courses, and so has the Lea, the town of Luton being 
situated on such a bed about half a mile in width, which extends, though 
narrower for the most part, to above Leagrave Marsh for some distance 
beyond the present source of this river. 
The old river-gravels of the Ouse near Bedford have been described 
by Sir Charles Lyell in his Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.’ 
It was at Biddenham, about 2 miles west of Bedford, that in 1861 Mr. 
James Wyatt first found the earliest traces of man in these gravels 
which here form the capping of a low hill nearly encircled by one of 
the windings of the river. Sir Joseph Prestwich had ascertained that 
the valley was bounded on both sides by Oolitic strata capped by boulder 
clay through which it had cut its way, and also that the gravel ‘ con- 
tained bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bos, equus, 
and cervus, which animals he therefore inferred must have been posterior 
in date to the boulder clay.’ In the same gravel many land and fresh- 
water shells had been found by Sir John Evans. These discoveries 
induced Mr. Wyatt to very carefully watch the excavation of the gravel 
from day to day for some months, and at last he saw two well-formed 
implements thrown out by the workmen ‘ from the lowest bed of stratified 
gravel and sand, 13 feet thick, containing bones of the elephant, deer, and 
ox, and many freshwater shells.’ The implements occurred at the base 
of the gravel and rested immediately on Oolitic limestone at a height of 
40 feet above the present level of the river. Since then Mr. Wyatt 
found several other flint tools in this gravel, and also a freshwater mollusc, 
Hydrobia marginata, which occurs in the south of France but no longer 
inhabits the British Isles. Remains of E/ephas antiquus have been dis- 
covered in the same gravel at Biddenham and elsewhere, and ‘ at Sum- 
merhouse Hill, which lies east of Bedford, lower down the valley of the 
Ouse, and four miles from Biddenham,’ Mr. Wyatt obtained ‘a flint 
implement associated with bones and teeth of hippopotamus.’ Sir 
Charles Lyell concluded that the Bedford sections ‘teach us that the 
fabricators of the antique tools and the extinct Mammalia coeval 
with them, were post-glacial, or, in other words, posterior to the 
grand submergence of central England beneath the waters of the 
glacial sea.’ 
The most important discovery of flint implements in the county is 
that of Mr. Worthington G. Smith at Caddington, an account of which 
1 First edition (1863), pp. 163-6 ; 4th ed. (1873), pp. 214-7. The quotations here given are 
from this, the last, edition. 
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