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

A FOUL DEED ON CISSBURY

Copyright Valerie Martin 2000

Opening the file on an age-old mystery and piecing together the jigsaw can be daunting, but after taking into account the evidence I have amassed, one or two possibilities emerge.

The story starts with one of the prominent Victorian archaeologists visiting the grand Cissbury hillside (Map Reference TQ140080) during what can now be called the age of prehistoric excavation on the summit.

In 1857 the archaeologist,  Colonel Augustus H. Lane Fox (born in 1827, died in 1900) arrived in Findon.    (This gentleman later changed his name when in his fifties to Lieutendant-General Augustus H. Pitt Rivers when he came into an inheritance.    It was a condition of the will under which he inherited his Dorset Estate that he changed his name to Pitt Rivers). 

Did he come to Findon by horse and coach?    Did he arrive by rail and make his way with his entourage by waggons to the summit?   Who knows, perhaps he took advantage of the hospitality at the Gun Inn run by the widow Jane Moodie. This was Victorian Findon when the every-day water was drawn from deep wells, and travel was by horse conveyance.   

The Colonel proceeded to make his first tentative excavations on Cissbury Ring.   I often wonder if he took off his jacket and waistcoat and helped with the digging proceedings or did he just give instructions?   Perhaps he employed some Findon workers to do the hard excavation work?  In his autobiography, he says that he employed local men to undertake the excavations.

1857 was the year of a Great Hailstorm in Findon and there was much damage to crops, glass and property.  The damage was estimate in the Worthing environs to be between £30,000 and £40,000.  Whether Colonel Lane Fox was here during this bad weather I cannot ascertain. 

In the autumn of 1867 (the year of the Great Restoration of Findon Church), Colonel Lane Fox returned to Findon yet again and began in earnest his pioneering excavations on Cissbury between September, 1867 and January, 1868. He was following in the footsteps of another explorer and excavator, George Irving who had looked at Cissbury some time before 1857. The Colonel described Cissbury for us during his days as being —

He was not the first to carry out explorations on Cissbury but his discoveries were especially interesting because he did have a very extraordinary find on the hillside.

He can be imagined climbing up to the windswept heights, which can now be visualised as he as conveniently told us that it was tufted with juniper (now long gone). No doubt puffing a little from exertion, he would have looked at the autumnal view all around, the deep coombes below and the glistening sea to the south. 

Colonel Lane Fox's first task was that of collecting the flints lying on the surface to see if they showed signs of having been worked by ancient man.

His enthusiasm was fired by his finds and next he inspected the fortifications and endeavoured to put a date to them.

Thirdly, he scrutinised the circular depressions on the hillside. He can be pictured standing on Cissbury as winter drew on, scratching his head in bewilderment and wondering why the dips in the ground were so numerous. They had long baffled the genius of antiquaries.   It was generally believed at the time that the sunken depressions on the south east aspect of the hillside were associated with the Iron Age Fort.... while others thought them to be the remains of sacrificial pits.... while some thought them to be associated with storing grain.

The Colonel concluded at first that those situated outside the ramparts could be graves. Upon closer observation he declared with elation that they were all the mouths to vertical shafts leading down to flint mines. The shafts themselves had been filled partly by man and nature, leaving only dimples on the Ring itself to indicate their presence. Little did he realise that, in fact, there were over two hundred and seventy of these mines on the hill. He was about to reveal a network of flint mines to be unequalled in Sussex.

The Colonel enthusiastically set about excavating a section of the rampart and ditch on the north-west side of the Ring. His theory proved correct and below the bottom of the ditch he revealed a number of galleries and shafts connecting with a very large shaft on the interior side of the embankment. The roof of the gallery was only some 3 ft. below the ditch. Surprisingly, there was no seepage through the overlying chalk and the galleries were virtually as dry as the day they were used in Neolithic times.

The ancient miners had sunk lateral galleries from the shafts to access the flint stratum they considered contained nodules of the desired quality. They had then proceeded to drive a veritable rabbit warren of further galleries to follow the stratum. In fact, the crown of the hill was virtually converted into a factory for the production of flint implements. A combined effort utilising ropes and leather bags (and manpower), would have brought the freshly mined flints to the surface, whereupon they were sorted and worked upon by flint knappers.

It was possible for the Colonel to now crawl slowly along on all fours through the prehistoric underground galleries he had unearthed. He was the first to follow in the footsteps of the ancient miners where they had sweated and toiled with primitive tools fashioned from red deer antlers.

As the Colonel wriggled his way along the tunnel he was quite aware that no one had passed this way for thousands of years. Probably not even a rabbit. He was completely unprepared for what happened next. The fully-formed lower jaw of a skeleton dropped on him as he was bent double on his hands and knees in the gloom.   He cried out in surprise.

He had somehow dislodged the remains of an entombed woman. It was later revealed that she was aged between twenty-five and thirty, 4 ft. 9 in. tall and buried head downwards in a vertical position in the yawning shaft. Her skull was abnormally large and had become displaced and strangely enough was upside down.

Had she fallen or was she pushed? Was she dead of alive when the fall occurred? All, or very nearly all, would be revealed.

It was later surmised that the body had been forcibly restrained around the arms and legs and lowered into the pit that was to be her grave before infilling with waste. It was also determined that the arms were somewhat short due to infantile paralysis. Almost every bone of the body was present in spite of her "accident". What had she done to deserve this unpleasant fate?

The deep shaft had been filled up some way before the woman fell, (or was she pushed, tipped or dropped, into the cavernous dark?). The skull was 2 ft. from the bottom of the shaft. Much rubble had come down in the fall to support the gruesome remains in its vertical situation; otherwise it would have been located flat on the floor of the shaft.

click on image to enlarge.

Plan of Cissbury Ring made in 1930 by R. Gurd.

The Neolithic flint miners had at some time evidently abandoned this particular pit. They had left a deposit of an assortment of bones of four pigs combined with the human bones, as well as those of ox, goat, fox and roe.

The question remains whether the woman went down alive or dead? Whether she was a worker in the mines will never be revealed.

In summing up, it is hard to see how the corpse could have maintained a vertical position if the fall was by accident. Not enough loose spoil would have been just lying about to go down with the body and hold it in its vertical position.

It is felt that the arms had been tightly bound to the body and the feet had been fastened together. It was believed that the unfortunate woman had been held vertical until sufficient sundry earth had been manually shovelled in. It had then been rammed firmly at ground level.

The earth at the bottom would have been somewhat looser round the head. On decomposition the head could have merely dropped from the spinal column and become inverted in its position. What had driven Neolithic man to take this dreadful action against one of their kind?

If the death had been a case of decapitation, it is thought that injuries would have been immediately noticeable to the cervical vertebrae.

One can now only guess at the interest which flared up when the find of the skeleton became general knowledge. The Victorian community of Findon was surely abuzz with morbid curiosity and speculation.

The Colonel finally departed from Cissbury in January 1868, only to return later in June 1875 to re-open his excavated pits of eight years before. I think Cissbury Ring had been on his mind for some time and he came back to satisfy himself — just to make sure he had fully excavated the flint mines on his previous visit. He found this had by no means been the case and there was more work to undertake.   I have no means of telling how long he spent on Cissbury but if he was still there in November 1875 he would have witnessed a gigantic wind of "more than 72 mph" roar through the countryside.   Nearby Worthing to the south of Cissbury Ring, awoke to find itself under water.

Cissbury Hill has been waiting for its history to be written and I have barely scratched the surface with this murder mystery at the end of the Stone Age.

Continue if you would like to read about the Weavers of Cissbury.

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