THIS IS FINDON VILLAGE — www.findonvillage.com created by Valerie Martin, contains scenes from her home village of Findon, West Sussex, U.K.
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on photo to enlargeThe fine old ramparts of Cissbury Ring (looking south) with Findon Valley below and Worthing beyond before the English Channel. |
DAVE RAMMELL'S CISSBURY DISCOVERIES
Copyright Valerie Martin 2004
When walking on the Downs I often think of how the sound of the chipping of flints once rang out over the countryside surrounding Findon in West Sussex. This would have been as Stone Age people, 3,600 years before the birth of Christ, sank over 150 mine shafts, some up to 50 ft. deep, in their quest for flints on the Cissbury hillside, as my diagram shows —
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It is difficult to walk the summit of Cissbury Ring and imagine, however hard I try, the flint mining operations. These ran on the principle of a modern coal mine but on a much smaller scale.
Let us try and correlate it with events in the bible...... for instance, think of Abraham leading his nomadic life in Canaan and this is when our flint mines were in full production of flint axes..... or even had possibly already been closed down.
When a shaft had been worked of flint, another was dug and the old shaft was logically filled up with the material excavated from the new. Thus all shafts when excavated are now filled up to the mouth with broken chalk. Amongst this loose debris there are often miners' thousands of years old relics, such as picks made from red deer antlers, shovels made from oxen shoulder-blades etc.
Have you ever stopped to wonder about the end results of the Neolithic flint mining on the Cissbury hillside above Findon? No need to ponder any longer.
During January 2004, I heard from Dave Rammell who has studied the subject.....
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January 2004 Hi there Valerie, I have collected a varied selection of stone tools, axe heads and other such evidence of flint knapping from the woods on the south side Cissbury over the last couple of years, I'd be happy to send you photo's for your site if they'd be of use.
just a thought!
D Rammell
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Many of them I can identify
myself as it is pretty obviouse what they are and what they were for, as for
the others I was going to try to see someone at museum, who can fill in
the blanks and identify the others for me (its pretty obviouse that they have
all been "hand made" but i dont know what some of them may have been used for) .
Anyway, I'll get together what I've got send some pics over the next few days.
I've attached a couple of pics to this e-mail for you to look at, these are two my favourite axe heads. The bigger of the two (above) is a big as your hand, and i could still imagine being able to fell a small tree with it. I send you the rest and what info I have on them soon, cheers Valerie Dave Rammell
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Hoping to hear from you again, Dave... together with more of your splendid photographs.
Here's another axe fragment. This time discovered at Findon Park Farm (not far from Cissbury Ring) in 1969 —
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on photo to enlarge |
Continue if you would like to read Flint Mines to Serpents.
This is Findon Village — www.findonvillage.com is a continually growing record created by Valerie Martin exclusively for documenting life in Findon.
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E-mail: valeriemartin@findonvillage.com |
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