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

SKELETON PIT

Copyright Valerie Martin 2000

The following is a genuine mystery concerning an early downsman and a probe into the dim and distant past in an attempt to discover the true facts.

High on the downland above Findon I often look at traces of the area's oldest industry — flint mining dating from 4,000-1,850 BC.

Cissbury is a noble promenade with half of the Sussex countryside appearing to swirl around the walker. From various parts of the ramparts it is possible on a clear day for me to see the Seven Sisters with the sea lapping at their feet.

In days before time, the ancient flint miners looked at a similar landscape, before descending into the gloom down the chalk shafts for their day's work in the flint mines.

One Neolithic miner crossed the tract of heath, bare except for a smattering of stunted bushes and dwarfed oaks. Curling fern fronds crunched underfoot as he approached the pit shaft. Blue flakes of flint lay among a few old roots on the ground. He perhaps pushed back his matted hair and peered down, and after testing a rung or two, swung over the pit edge and stepped down with the practised ease of a miner into the cool gloom.

The chalky entrance was worn smooth and rounded by frequent use. He picked his way. In places the chalk floor was damp and slimy. The reflected light grew dim and he crouched for perhaps a couple of minutes with eyes screwed up to accustom his vision to the poor light — before crawling forward. He carried an oval flint hatchet.

At some point during his work, there was a sudden rumble, the tumble of a falling wall. He lurched back and groped, clambered and fumbled along the floor of his tunnel. There was a cracking noise.

At the entrance to the shaft there were large blocks of chalk to act as barriers in case of emergency. If he could retreat behind such a barrier, he could perhaps escape by one of the outlets in the wall. He was in an atmosphere of uncertainty and bewilderment as he curled up and an avalanche of soil and rocks almost enveloped him. His brain refused to function. It was much later that his fellow miners discovered his body laying on its right-hand side.

The mine was abandoned and the walls of the shaft bore signs of weathering as the pit gradually filled up in the course of time.

Thousands of years later, one of the Victorian explorers on Cissbury Ring was Mr. J. Park Harrison. He carried out excavations on the many scoops on the side of the hill and had a grisly find in one of them. Human remains were unearthed, buried two feet under chalk rubble in an abandoned flint mine shaft that had half filled up with waste earth. The skeleton was that of a short man of 4 ft. 11 in. in height, aged between twenty-five and thirty. (Evidence later disclosed that the miner had suffered from hemiplegia when a child).

The miner was laying on his right side, contracted, that is to say with his knees arranged less than 6 ins. from its chin. The body was in a curled up position and surrounded by a single row of chalk blocks and large unworked flints. In front of the knees lay a discarded large oval flint hatchet. A fire marked pebble lay beside the body. Chalk spoil had been dumped some two feet deep over the corpse and six flint implements had been thrown in for good measure. Presumably the rude shaft had naturally filled up afterwards in the course of time.

From that day Park Harrison dubbed the area "Skeleton Pit".

Continue if you would like to read about The Cissbury Rifle Range on the southern side of Cissbury Ring in the early 1900s..

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This is Findon Village — www.findonvillage.com is a continually growing record created exclusively for documenting life in Findon.