This website created by Valerie Martin and contains scenes from her home village of Findon, West Sussex, U.K.

Copyright Valerie Martin 2000

Findon was once a great centre for the flint mine industry. This was thousands of years ago when the workings flourished during the Neolithic period 4,000-1,850 BC. Mines were operational on Cissbury Hill, Blackpatch, Tolmare and Church Hill.

From the Early Stone Age, men realised they could work the hard glassy substance of flint into any desired shape or form. They chipped off slivers (known as flakes) and using another stone, or piece of antler as a hammer, manually shaped the flint into an implement, such as an axe. The razor-like edges of flint when flakes were sliced off could be used as cutting implements, or further shaped into primitive knives, piercing tools, scrapers and even arrowheads.

Today, Cissbury (Map Reference TQ140080) is a great grassy glorious mound of some sixty acres — it is a walk of a mile and a half round the ramparts — which are in places nearly 40 ft. above the ditch. It is partly covered with gorse and surprising clumps of violets grow abundantly. It is easy to locate the depressions that indicate the filled-in shafts of the flint mines — abandoned by the Neolithic miners as they dug new shafts.

It has not been ascertained where these ancient miners actually lived. The faint outline of a prehistoric track can be seen traversing the countryside from north to south on the Cissbury Estate from the western escarpment of the Ring. This, no doubt, played a vital part in the movement of Neolithic people. They may have camped on the actual hillside during the summer and had permanent homes on lower ground for the rest of the year.

The first archæologists to climb up the hillside of Cissbury to investigate were Victorian explorers. They wandered around, drew maps and marvelled at the view below them.

Cissbury Ring in the distance — circa 1820 from the north end of Chapel Road looking towards the village of Broadwater.

The Reverend Edward Turner journeyed to Findon sometime prior to 1849. He could have been one of the first visitors to the village to arrive in the area by train to the nearest railway station and then made it by coach or waggon up to the summit. The coastal railway line to Worthing opened in 1846 and finally brought an end to the London - Worthing horse-drawn coaches that clattered through The Square in Findon. The Reverend came to study the Cissbury heights and after much exploration made an important discovery on the windy summit. He found the foundations of a Roman building. Over a hundred and fifty years ago the outline of the foundations was faintly visible in dry weather.

In 1876 the Reverend's theory was seemingly confirmed when further Victorian explorers reported they had found tesserae thrown up by burrowing rabbits. The mosaics they had seen were again located near the centre of the summit.

Sheila Watson e-mailed me on 31st December 2001 because she had found the above likeness of the Reverend Edward Turner amongst some family papers.  The name of the artist in the bottom left-hand is L. Haghe.  On the right-hand is printed The Reverend Edward Turner M.A.   W. Day's lithograph. As far as Sheila knows the name Turner is not connected to her family history.  

She did a search on the Internet and came up with the Reverend Edward Turner in this article relating to Cissbury Ring. 

Sheila had the 1881 Census on CD-Rom and discovered an Edward T. Turner whose occupation was described as Reg Univ Oxford Vice Princ Bnc Clergyman Without Cure of Souls, aged 58, living in Oxford.   She wondered if he could be my Victorian clergyman-cum-archaeologist.

As this seems highly probably, I am including the Reverend Edward Turner's image with my article with a query — until someone comes along to prove me wrong or confirms I am correct in my assumption.

Later the explorers on the Cissbury hill became excavators as well. Sometime before 1857 George Irving was the first of these. He clambered around the slopes and noted the unusual strange hollows in the ground and decided to excavate to find out what they were. Unknowingly he had found four mouths to shafts leading to underground Neolithic flint mines. After much hard work he dug down to a depth of about 13ft. Unfortunately, he ignored any flints he came across and discarded them without a thought. He considered them of no consequence. It was obviously not a great time for collecting flint implements.

George Irving concluded that the depressions in the ground he was working on were mere water reservoirs. He walked away down the hill none the wiser. He went home with a King William II halfpenny in his pocket, plus some oyster shells, fragments of bones and odds and ends of pottery. He had missed the point completely and had come to the incorrect conclusion that Cissbury Ring had been built by the Romans.

Today, the circular scoops and grassy covered hillocks are all that indicate the location of the mine shafts just as in George Irving's time. The nearby hummocky mounds are the heaps of unwanted chalk debris excavated from the ancient shafts during their construction. The surface of the Ring is simply teeming with abundant timeworn remains such as waste flakes, the occasional scraper and other ancient implements from the flint mines.

Continue if you would like to read about The Waterspout.

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