MORTIMER : SMALL PITS ON ALLERSTON AND EBBERSTON MOORS. 153 
Some other explanation must be given. 
After my first visit in 1891, I mentioned those pits to Mr. 
Matthew Slater, of Malton, who had seen them and the extensive 
"Dykes" (entrenchments) in the same neighbourhood, during his 
botanical rambles on these moors, and he shrewdly suggested to me 
that they might be unfinished entrenchments. 
Not until after my last and very careful inspection of the whole 
of the lines of pits, in June. 1894, was I fully convinced that Mr. 
Slater's suggestion was the right one, They are almost certainly the 
beginnings of lines of dykes, or entrenchments, which from some 
cause or other, were never completed. Their unfinished condition 
is a fortunate accident, as it gives us a key to the mode of proceeding 
in forming the extensive and puzzling entrenchments which traverse 
the moors and the Yorkshire wolds in every direction. 
It would seem that, on planning the directions which the dykes 
were to take, a line of workmen were placed at regular distances with 
orders to commence work, and that after having so far penetrated 
the ground ns to form the pits, the workmen in those particular 
sections, from some cause or other (probably, along one line, the wet 
nature of the ground, as previously stated) received orders to dis- 
continue their work ; hence the production of these rows of regularly 
placed pits and slightly raised banks which have so long perplexed 
alike the antiquary and the geologist. Certainly the long prevailing 
opinion that these lines of hollows on AUerston and Ebberston moors 
at least mark the sites of pit-dwellings or the shafts left in mining, 
must now be entirely given up. 
In addition to these lines of pits, there are also on the moors, 
and in numerous places on the chalk wolds, very similar pits, but 
mostly in clusters. These also have often been erroneously named 
pit-dwellings ; but, when carefully examined, they are in almost every 
instance found to have been formed by quarrying for ironstone, chalk, 
clay, or gravel, for building and other purposes during mediaeval 
times, and up to the last century. Perhaps a few on the chalk wolds 
were made even as early as ancient British times, for the purpose of 
obtaining flints, which were used for making sling-stones, axes, and 
other rough tools and weapons. 
