114 
DEPOSITS OF THE LEEN VALLEY. 
presumably of Triassic age! As I expected, it turned out that they 
had met with a small patch of peat nestled in a hollow in the surface 
of the old rocky bed of the Leen, and just underneath the ferruginous 
gravel, showing that before and perhaps partly during the formation of 
the brown gravel the Leen Valley nourished a luxuriant vegetation, of 
which only the merest fragments had been thus accidentally preserved, 
I have already stated that no bones or other remains of animals 
have been found in the Glacial deposits of the Leen Valley. While 
examining the right bank of the stream, just north of Bui well Spring, 
two summers ago, however, I chanced to notice a bone embedded in 
the gravel, through which the Leen here cuts its way. The gravel it¬ 
self is probably Post-glacial, and the bone was found eight or ten feet 
above the level of the water. Prof. Boyd Dawkins, M.A., P.R.S., who 
was so good as to examine the bone for me, found it to belong to 
the “ small domestic ox of the Bos longifrons type, an animal introduced 
into this country in the Neolithic Age, and which still survives in the 
small Scotch, Welsh, and Irish cattle.” Prof. Dawkins adds that 
“ its bones are commonly met with in the pre-historic and historic 
refuse heaps, but never in undisturbed Pleistocene strata.” 
It now only remains for me to point out some of the chief inferences 
to be drawn from the evidence furnished by these interesting sections. 
The Drift deposits of the Leen Valley carry us back to the time, many 
thousands of years ago, when Arctic conditions prevailed in Britain, 
and immense glaciers descended slowly towards the coast, leaving 
patches and mounds of rocky debris in the more sheltered hollows, or 
at the spots where two or more ice-streams coalesced. All the evidence 
afforded by the Drift deposits of the Leen Valley points to the conclu¬ 
sion that the ice which formed them crossed the valley more or less 
obliquely, and came from a north-north-westerly direction—or in other 
words, from the southern extremity of the Pennine Hills. The Leen 
Valley then presented much the same general outline as it does now, 
except that the bottom of the valley was in some parts a ravine, in 
others a ----shaped hollow, now filled with alluvial gravel and silt. 
There is abundant evidence round our sea-coasts that the British Isles 
stood higher out of the water then than they do now, and England was 
united to the Continent. It was about this time that the Creswell 
Caves, only a few miles farther north, afforded shelter, now to the Palaeo¬ 
lithic hunter, now to the hyaena, the woolly rhinoceros, the lion, the 
reindeer, the wolf, and other wild beasts that have long since ceased 
to inhabit these islands. It seems probable that the Drift once lay 
much thicker in the Leen Valley than it does now, and may even have 
choked it up altogether for a time. A long interval appears to have 
elapsed between the accumulation of the Drift and the deposition of 
the “ tumultuous gravel,” during which the ice melted away, and the 
climate became somewhat ameliorated, though perhaps still rigorous.* 
It was probably during this interval, and when the valley was filled 
with frozen snow, that the coarse red sand and pebbles which forms the 
* Prof. James Geikie, F.E.S., “ Pre-historic Europe,” p. 387, et seq. 
