390 Archceologia. 



ARCH^OLOGIA. 



The coast of Cheshire, extending from the mouth of the Dee to 

 that of the Mersey, especially the part of it adjacent to the village 

 of Hotlake, and forming part of the ancient hundred of Wirrall, has 

 long been an object of interest to the antiquary, in consequence of 

 the numerous antiquities, usually small objects, such as buckles, 

 rings, brooches, etc., which have been continually picked up on the 

 beach. These antiquities, which range from the Roman period until 

 comparatively recent times, form the subject of a volume of con- 

 siderable interest, by Dr. Hume, of Liverpool ; and they now begin to 

 assume increased interest in connection with geological questions, 

 and that all engrossing question, the Antiqnity of Man. These 

 coasts, in fact, have no doubt undergone very great changes within 

 no very great space of time. At a meeting of the Ethnological 

 Society, last year, Professor Busk exhibited and described a skull, 

 with other human bones, found, as it was said, under a layer of 

 ancient peat, which itself lay under sandhills of very great elevation. 

 Some little excitement was created by the discovery of these re- 

 mains, which were at first believed to be those of a man of the pre- 

 historic ages, but Professor Busk expressed the opinion that their 

 antiquity was not great, and such proves, from an examination 

 of the locality, to be the case. It shows how cautious we ought to 

 be in forming conclusions of the antiquity of objects from the mere 

 position in which they lie. As the antiquities alluded to, which are 

 washed up by the tide or by the waves of the sea, continue to be 

 picked up on the beach, without any apparent diminution of their 

 numbers, they are continually furnishing new objects of interest ; 

 and we read with pleasure in the new number of that excellent 

 periodical, the Reliquary, an account of the discoveries made in this 

 neighbourhood during the last year, in an article by Mr. Ecroyd 

 Smith, who has carefully surveyed the ground, and has given 

 sections which explain much of the mystery in which these anti- 

 quities have been involved. 



This coast, as just stated, is at present formed by great hills 

 of loose, shifting sand, which rest upon a layer of marshy deposit 

 of little depth, and of no very remote date. It was in or under this 

 bed, which was mistaken by the finder for ancient peat, that the 

 human remains were found, and they were probably those of a 

 drowned man, whose body had been cast on the shore and hastily 

 buried, as Mr. Ecroyd Smith thinks, within three hundred years of 

 the present time. Next beneath this thin marshy deposit comes a 

 much thicker bed of firm drift sand, in which are found mediaeval 

 articles, with occasionally a few remains of an earlier period at the 

 bottom of it. This is followed by a still deeper bed of artificial 

 arable soil, composed of bog and sand, mixed with a little marl. 

 The objects found in this bed are also mediaeval, including frag- 

 ments of pottery, and bones of domestic animals, and among these 

 was the Bos longifrons. As the antiquities found in this bed 

 appear all to belong to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this 

 discovery brings the continued existence of the Bos longifrons down 





