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

By the middle of the Bronze Age, bronze was becoming sufficiently common to be a growing market commodity to rival flint.   Cissbury suffered as a consequence and an increasingly serious market depression occurred before its final demise as a centre of flint production.

The Bronze Age, 1,850-550 BC, brought the Beaker People to the Cissbury slopes above Findon. They came from Spain into France and across to Britain to settle. They derived their name from the drinking-cup that was habitually buried with the dead for use in after life.

For more than a thousand years, in successive migrations and with varying cultures, Bronze Age men found shelter in scattered isolated farmsteads on ridges with their cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. Some led a semi-nomadic existence, wandering from place to place.

The Bronze Age is linked with a return to colder, drier conditions and the bleak windswept height of Cissbury would have become less hospitable to dwell on at this time. Although, the mouths of disused Neolithic flint mines could have been convenient locations for the making of Bronze Age homes. The mine entrances would have needed little more than a circular thatch roof on a couple of feet of simple walling being all that was necessary to complete a semi-subterranean hut. 

In 1973 the skeletons of two adults and a child were turned up by a rather surprised workman digging foundations for a fence near a trackway leading from Cissbury Ring to Chanctonbury Ring.  

No, a modern day murder investigation wasn't instigated back in 1973.... sorry to disappoint you.....the remains were deemed to have been inhabitants of our area in the distant past.....the Bronze Age.

In recent years the "Cissbury treasure" came to light.  This was a Bronze Age torc.  The neck ornament formed from a twisted band of gold was unearthed by Ian Ticehurst of Findon when he was in the process of erecting a fence post on the Cissbury Estate below the Ring where he was working.  The torc is now in the Worthing Museum.

A neighbouring Bronze Age settlement has also been excavated comparatively close by at Park Brow to the north-east.

Flint mining assuredly continued on Cissbury as bronze implements were scarce and highly prized. The Bronze Age miners looked out from Cissbury Ring as the civilisation before them. The manufacture of flint implements continued right through the Bronze Age until iron became available in large supplies. Anyone who could not afford bronze still used the readily available flint.

Having excavated the flints, the miners still proceeded to knap them into the shape of their desire, whether as day-to-day implements or weapons. Cissbury was still a mighty workshop and was literally littered with flint chippings, flakes and cores. Flint knapping was brought to a very high state of craftsmanship and flint implements continued to be designed and used on Cissbury long after the Bronze Age began in the Findon area.

Continue if you would like to read about the Fort Builders of Cissbury Ring.

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