DR. C. B. PLOWRIGHT ON NEOLITHIC MAN IN WEST NORFOLK. 263 
same view was held as to the nature of Grimes’s Graves, near 
Brandon, and this view was the accepted one until the excavations 
made in 1870, by the Rev. Canon Greenwell, revealed their true 
nature. Careful inquiries were therefore made as to the existence 
of any number of hollows upon the common, but, strange to say, 
without success ; several visits were made to the locality before 
much light was thrown upon the subject. A short distance to the 
north of the before-mentioned pit there is a circular depression in 
the ground, forty feet across in its widest part and about thirty in 
its narrowest, and some eight feet deep ; at the bottom of this 
hollow a number of flakes were found. That this is not an 
excavation made in recent times for stone is pretty evident, 
because had it been so some trace of a cart-way out of it would 
have been visible. Still further to the north, near the Gnmston 
road, aro other similar bowl-shaped depressions, one eighty by 
sixty feet across and fifteen deep. Another, as nearly as possible 
circular at the top, ninety feet across. The bottom of the last- 
named is divided by a ridge into two nearly equal cup-like hollows, 
one eight the other ten feet deep, exactly as wo see many of the 
hollows at Weeting. A fourth depression exists in a ploughed 
field, a very short distance to the north-east. In all the above 
flakes wore found by Dr. Brown and myself. Two other similar 
hollows, one forty and the other nearly fifty feet across, exist on 
the higher ground, a little to the south of the Grimston road. 
All the above have the same general appearance : circular de- 
pressions, about eight or ten feet deep, from forty to ninety feet in 
diameter, without any trace of a cart-way out of them, in which 
flakes are found. Looking at them one cannot but be struck by 
their resemblance to the hollows at Grimes’s Graves — from the 
abundance of flakes on the surface of the land around them, and 
from the fact that large blocks of flints suitable for the manufacture 
of flint implements are imbedded in the chalk at a short distance 
from the surface. There is strong reason to believe that these 
hollows owo their origin to the same cause as Grimes’s Graves do, 
namely, that they were shafts sunk by neolithic man for the 
purpose of procuring suitable flint for the fabrication of the various 
articles manufactured from it by him. 
Their large size precludes the notion that they were ever 
“ Ancient British Huts ; ” and their depth, which must have been 
VOL. v. 
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