DAVIS: ANCIENT FLINT-USERS OE YORKSHIRE. 
415 
peat is frequently 8 or 10 feet in thickness, and occasionally attainis 
a depth of 12 or 15 feet, and there is little doubt that its accumula- 
tion has occupied a long period of years. When the Romans occupied 
this country, and had their seat of government at York, in the early 
centuries of the Christian era, the chai'acter of the country was much 
as it is now, and the Roman centurian in his ride from Eboracum to 
Mancunium, would find the transit across the Penine chain as dreary 
and as cheerless as his modern representative of a more peaceful 
calling, the manufacturer of forty or fifty years ago, who periodically 
crossed the hills in all kinds of weather, with a packhorse which 
carried the result of a week's labour, to be sold on the other side. 
Whether the people who used the flint arrow-heads and left 
them in the sandy substratum existed and migrated beneath the 
branches of the trees whose ba5es still exist, it is impossible to say, 
but there can be little doubt, that if not living beneath their shadow, 
the men were anterior to the trees. The large extent in area over 
which the flint implements have been found, is evidence that the 
population must have been comparatively large, but much additional 
information must be obtained before anything more than the merest 
surmise can be ventured upon as to their state of barbarism, or 
whether these people, probably amongst the earliest of which there 
is any record in the county, were even at this early date in possession 
of some of the rudiments of civilization, and enjoyed some of the 
comforts of house and co-operation, resulting from the accumulated _ 
experience of a still more remote ancestry. It is a subject for specu- 
lation whether the inhabitants of the hilly country between Yorkshire . 
and Lancashire had any relationship with the earlier tribes who 
inhabited the caves further north. In the Victoria cave, near Settle, 
flint implements have been found beneath stalagmite and clay, which 
indicate a very early type of man who lived ages before the Roman., 
era ; and in Wensleydale and other parts of the North Riding similar 
remains of a prehistoric man exists, who appears mainly to have . 
sought refuge and shelter in caves. There is no tangible evidence 
that the cave men and the hill men were contemporaneous, only a 
few fragments of flint, a cut and pointed bone, or a fragment of bone 
carved to form a rude adornment for some native beauty, or perhaps 
