PEOPLE OF THE SUBMERGED FOREST 35 
Megalithic monuments of the Neolithic period abound. 
Beneath the blown sand of the " links " occur, as at Harlyn 
Bay, the same serried cist tombs, the same Neolithic 
kitchen-middens. On the foreshore of Cornwall as of 
Jersey we can see at low tide remnants of the same 
ancient land surface, marked by the peat-stained stumps 
of the trees of the submerged forest. In Cornwall, 
remains of the men who lived on that ancient land 
surface have been found. In their day the cliffs of 
Cornwall overlooked wooded plains where now coasting 
steamers come and go. The submerged forest is not 
confined to the foreshore of Cornwall. It creeps up the 
estuaries of the streams which drain the tin-producing 
hills of the inlands. In those estuaries of the Cornish 
coast, the submerged forest lies buried, as in the valley 
of the lower Thames, beneath 30 to 50 feet of deposits 
laid down by the streams as the land sank and the 
invading sea crept inland. The submerged forest in the 
Thames valley grew on the " ballast-gravel " bed of the 
Thames. In the Cornish estuaries the submerged forest 
o 
rests on a corresponding deposit laid down in the original 
or deepest bed of the streams. The Cornish streams, 
in ancient times, brought, not only the debris from the 
weathered granite of the hills, but also tin ore, which 
came to rest in the bottom stratum of the valleys and 
estuaries. 
To the student of ancient man, that proved a fortunate 
circumstance, for the tin miners had frequently to 
expose and explore the old forest bed overlying the 
tin-producing stratum. In the museum of the Royal 
College of Surgeons of England, there is the roof and 
sides of a skull from the horizon of the Cornish sub- 
merged forest. It was found in 1809, at a depth of 
26 feet, in the Carnon Stream Tin Works, which were, 
for these river-bed workings came to an end nearly a 
century ago, situated on a western branch of that inlet 
of the sea which pierces Cornwall at Falmouth. Fortu- 
nately, we have a record of the strata exposed at the 
Carnon Works in 1807 — two years before the skull was 
