A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE 
type, are found here and there in the brick-earth, having been washed 
down from the higher land with the material by which the Palzolithic 
floor was covered up. But little of this higher land now exists, Cadding- 
ton, the site of which then was near the bottom of the valley, being 
now nearly at the top of the hill. A flint from this brown drift has 
been found with apparent ice-scratchings, one of which stops suddenly 
at an artificially-flaked surface, showing that the scratches were made 
before the flint was chipped ; and neither here nor elsewhere has a 
glacial scratch or groove been seen on an artificially-worked surface. 
Nowhere can evidence be found of a pre-Glacial flint-chipping animal ; 
but man may have existed for ages before he acquired the art of chipping 
flints to a fine edge and so first left evidence of his presence. 
The ochreous implements found in the brick-earth of the Cadding- 
ton hillside are probably of the same geological age as the older imple- 
ments of the valley-gravels. Both date back to an earlier period than 
that of the deposition of the beds in which they occur, having been 
washed into these beds from a pre-existing land surface ; but the lustrous 
implements were fashioned during intervals of non-deposition of the 
brick-earth, the men who made them being contemporary with that 
formation. 
While the brick-earth is mostly if not altogether water-laid, the 
clay-with-flints which caps the hills of Upper Chalk has a very different 
origin. It is the residue of the Chalk left after its dissolution by water 
holding carbonic acid in solution, and also of Tertiary and more recent 
clays which formerly covered the Chalk. Its formation has doubtless 
been going on during the whole of the time that the Chalk has been 
above the level of the sea, and it is still proceeding, but it may generally 
be considered as of (post-Glacial) Pleistocene and Recent age. It is a 
stiff brown and red clay containing unworn flints, which are often much 
broken up by frost and by the plough, and its presence may be recognized 
in ploughed fields by the soil appearing to consist of little else than 
broken flints. The surface of the Chalk, except when covered by an 
impervious stratum, is exceedingly uneven, owing to its unequal dissolu- 
tion, and the clay-with-flints upon it may be of any thickness, from less 
than a foot when its surface is fairly even, to many feet when a‘ pipe’ is 
formed which the clay-with-flints fills up. A layer of flints in the 
Chalk may sometimes be seen extending across a pipe, let down a little 
where embedded in the clay. In an old chalk-pit on Farley Hill, now 
closed, a line of Chalk Rock nodules occupied a similar position in a 
broad but shallow pipe of brown clay. 
RECENT 
The Recent accumulations of Bedfordshire are unimportant, except 
in connection with the Neolithic flint implements which they contain. 
They consist almost entirely of the alluvium of existing rivers, which is 
nowhere of great extent. There are far wider stretches of alluvium in 
the valley of the Colne than there are in Bedfordshire in that of the 
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