Reports of Societies. 



39 



clilf of mountain limestone some 200 feet in height, about a mile from 

 Settle, It is 900 feet higher than the adjoining river Ribble, and 1450 

 feet above the sea. Since 1870 the scientific exploration of the Cave has 

 been conducted by a committee of the British Association, whose mode 

 of work and its results Mr. Tate explained on the spot. Several yards of 

 talus of angular fragments, weathered off the cliflf, having been removed, 

 the entrance to the cave is now completely cleared down to the pinnacles 

 of rock jutting out of the floor, and exposing a beautiful series of arched 

 niches, such as characterise the water caves of Craven and indicate their 

 origin. The cutting of this trench supplied evidence of successive 

 occupations by man, and animals strange to Yorkshire, during historic 

 and pre-historic times. A thin dark line along the side of the trench 

 marks the most recent occupation. Near the entrance it consisted of 

 about two feet of charcoal, bones, and burnt flag-stones, forming the 

 ancient hearths of men who had used the cave for a home. The bones 

 were the remains of species of animals such as still live in Britain — the 

 Celtic short-horned ox, the goat, pig, horse, and dog, with the occasional 

 remains of stag, badger, and fox. The remains of the domestic fowls, 

 introduced into this country by the Romans, supply a chronological limit 

 in one direction, and the abundant use of the short-horned ox for food in 

 another. For this species of ox, which is now confined to the mountains 

 of Wales and Scotland, was the only breed of oxen reared by the 

 inhabitants of the Brit- Welsh kingdom of Elmete," extending from 

 Leeds to Settle. This little kingdom was devastated by the English in 

 615, and the men and oxen of that period were driven westward by the 

 ancestors of the present Yorkshire dalesmen, and had to defend them- 

 selves in the fastnesses of Wales. These facts combined enable us to say 

 that the Cave was last inhabited by the Brit- Welsh people of the fifth and 

 sixth centuries, who were driven from this part of the country during the 

 troublous times of the English invasion. Six feet below this historic 

 layer lies another bed of charcoal and ashes, presenting very different 

 characteristics. In this lower layer we pass beyond the time when there 

 was any knowledge of metals, to a period when ground and polished bone 

 and stone implements were used. Bone harpoons, chipped flint tools 

 fastened into bone handles, arrow-heads and polished stone celts mark 

 the neolithic stage of culture. Who were these neolithic men, and whence 

 came they ? The domestic animals by which they were accompanied had 

 never roamed wild in Britain. It was in Asia that they had been 

 domesticated, and from that continent these neolithic men had pushed 

 westward. They were in all probability closely allied to the Basque 

 tribes found peopling the Iberian Peninsula and the north of the 

 Pyrenees at the dawn of history. They had introduced domestic animals 

 from Asia, and their bill of fare was occasionally enriched by the products 

 of the chase, as testified by the bones of wild beasts left in the cave. 

 Entering the cave, this layer passes insensibly into the upper cave earth. 



