THIS IS FINDON VILLAGE — these Chronicles are  created by Valerie Martin and contain scenes from her home village of Findon, West Sussex, U.K.

BLACKPATCH AND ITS SECRETS

Copyright Valerie Martin 2006

Reference: TQ 094 088
Longitude: 0° 26' 42.42" W
Latitude: 50° 52' 7.12" N

There are some questions relating to Findon that I have been unable to answer.   Such as "Why is Canada Barn so called?"   This is still unanswered to this day.     Another one is "Why is Blackpatch Hillside so called".  

Gerald White an ex-Shoreham.... now living in Lincoln has emailed...... "The question about Blackpatch Hill, I don't have an answer however, at Shoreham, on the now defunct Little Buckingham farm , there was a field on the downland above the farm , it was also called Blackpatch field.

As a young lad I earned a few bob, thinning out beetroots and carrots, in the same field.

The Housing estate built on the land, records the name, with a short lane called Blackpatch Grove.

Maybe it was something to do with the colour of the soil, which was predominately grey coloured, reflecting the underlying chalk. ......Gerald"

So that little mystery also continues to this day.

One day during a ramble in the early 1930s, Barclay Wills discovered five sheep in a hole on Blackpatch.   The last one to be luckily rescued had wedged itself into a cavity which communicated with a gallery of the adjacent flint mine that was in the process of being unearthed.... see bottom of picture.   The sheep in the photograph was roped and hauled out.

Incidentally, Barclay Wills said that this incident occurred only a few yards from the spot where the jaw bones of a small prehistoric sheep had been found during excavations.

In the spring of 2005 I received an email from the Channel 4 Time Team saying that they were going to undertake filming in Findon...... but they omitted to say exactly what they intended doing, so I was pleased to receive an email from Tony Hammond giving me a little more information on their visit.

The magnificent and massive hillside of Blackpatch at 500 ft. lies just to the north west of Findon.  I have always found Blackpatch to be a bit of a disappointment because it is virtually treeless and has no footpaths.     On a dull day it can look rather dark and foreboding from the Findon direction.    It does contain a trig point (number on flush bracket S3997). The fenced off area behind the trig point is used I understand by model aircraft enthusiasts. 

The hillside also boasts much valuable information on prehistoric flint mining.  Neolithic men worked flints on Blackpatch Hill but today only low hollows on the southern slope of the hillside (TQ 094 088) remain.   These indentations indicate where more than a hundred flint mine shafts were sunk and now lie buried beneath the soil.   Seven of these were  excavated in the 1920s by the archaeologist, John Pull, and resulted in the discovery that the pits were dug to reach a seam of nodular flint about 3.4m in depth.  

Galleries radiated from most of these shafts for as far as daylight permitted the Neolithic workers to see what they were doing.     It appears logical that when a new gallery was excavated the residue of chalk extracted was deposited in one of the already worked galleries. 

Some of the shafts contained cremations and burials, and small barrows were built over the filled up flint mines.

From the remains that have been discovered, it is possible to deduce that these mines had been worked intermittently for a span of some 500 years through the Neolithic to Middle Bronze Age.   If a a new shaft had been dug roughly every five years this would have supplied the needs of a small community.   John Pull found that traces of such a village were north east of the mines (on the other side of the footpath up the hillside).

The small farming settlement with a collection of circular huts (miners' homes) and field systems on Blackpatch's western edges are typical of the Middle Bronze Age period.

I began to wonder at this point what it was exactly that the Channel 4 Time Team were intending to do on the barren slopes of Blackpatch.

Tony Hammond then reported that they are looking for experienced excavators and enthusiastic volunteers to take part in whatever it was they were after.   No, no.....I was not offering my services free as an experienced excavator nor was I going to be an enthusiastic volunteer.  

I then heard from Bronwen Russell (who knew Cissbury Ring well) and was the Project Manager of the Archaeological Investigations at Bournemouth University.   She told me that there was going to be a guided tour of the Channel 4 Time Team's excavations on the nearby Blackpatch hillside on Sunday 12th June 2005 at 11 a.m.   Tony Hammond set off to attend....

This was the Time Team's first excavation in Findon .... I wonder why it took them so long to discover us?   They were looking into the mysteries of life in the Findon area between 4300 and 3500 BC and set out to  re-evaluating the Neolithic dwelling sites located by John Pull on the hillside.    Many years ago, this Findon explorer had identified seven Neolithic dwellings at Blackpatch.

To read all I know about John Pull.... click on my narrative entitled.... Murder of a Findon Explorer.

Some of the artefacts (including flint axes) John Pull discovered are now in the Worthing Museum.

I'm not quite sure why, but great secrecy surrounded the Time Team dig of 2005, which aimed to unearth the mysteries of life at our Neolithic settlement — the farming and industry.  They wanted to unlock the key to explaining the lives of those who had introduced farming to our area.   The programme ended in focusing on a fascinating ultimately tragic human story of John Pull intertwined with his archaeological discovery at Blackpatch Hill.    Archaeological surveyors are great enlighteners and can transform the humps and bumps of the Findon landscape into vivid history —and John Pull was one of these men.  

The late Donald Pull from Campton in Bedfordshire then thoughtfully wrote to me enclosing the following photographs of the proceedings on Blackpatch hill.  (Don sadly died in August 2008).      John Pull's daughter, Beryl Heryet who lives in Worthing, attended the Time Team dig on our hillside.   She said —

"It is nice to know his feats have been recognised.  I think it is good for archaeology and for the people who helped him with his digs".

While on my walks on Cissbury Ring with Suzie and Katie I could see the Time Team dig going on at the side of Blackpatch...... with the little yellow digger at work on the hillside.  

Why do people think they are going somewhere special when they dash off to see Stonehenge?     Prehistory is much closer to home in the flints around our hillsides.   About 4200 BC in the Neolithic Age, there is evidence that flints were mined at Church Hill above Findon....and the Blackpatch hillside..... and this was about 900 years before anyone was thinking about constructing Stonehenge.   Think about that when you next stand on the rim of the dips in the ground on Cissbury Ring that were once the shafts down to the mines.

I set of one evening to find the location of the Blackpatch mines...... and the excavators were still working at 7.30 p.m.

Extracts from the Worthing Herald dated 23rd June 2005 —

The television programme went out on Sunday, 19th March 2006.  I did not think that the Time Team's efforts on Blackpatch Hill were very conclusive after all the efforts on the downland.   The summing up of their "dig" gave the impression that about 6,000 years ago, people came to a tree clad Blackpatch.    Here they sank mines in search of flint to use for axes to clear the trees.

After the mining era drew to a close, the site became a sacred place.

After about 4,000 years a ring barrow was built and ritual pits placed around it.

6,000 years later, Blackpatch became the place it is today, a place of settlement and agriculture and still keeping some of its mysteries close to its chest.

I received an email from the late Roger Moulds (sadly he died in January 2012)....

Continue to read about the Harrow Hill Flint Mines.

THIS IS FINDON VILLAGE — www.findonvillage.com is a continually growing record created by Valerie Martin exclusively for documenting life in Findon.