Going down
It's about 29°C out there today, but Jane and I managed to find somewhere a bit cooler for a day out.
About 4500 years ago (about the same time they were knocking up Stonehenge) a bunch of neolithic lads spent their days digging up huge chunks of flint from a soft chalk hill in Thetford forest. Today the site, known as Grimes Graves, is an English Heritage site. You can explore the pock-marked landscape, and even descend 30 feet into a restored mine, which stays a cool 10°C all the year round.
The mine represents one summer's work by the prehistoric miners, and it's quite amazing what they achieved, especially when you consider that they had no metal picks, or spades, or wheelbarrows. In fact, the most sophisticated tools they had at the time were made from the very flint they were mining.
About 4500 years ago (about the same time they were knocking up Stonehenge) a bunch of neolithic lads spent their days digging up huge chunks of flint from a soft chalk hill in Thetford forest. Today the site, known as Grimes Graves, is an English Heritage site. You can explore the pock-marked landscape, and even descend 30 feet into a restored mine, which stays a cool 10°C all the year round.
The mine represents one summer's work by the prehistoric miners, and it's quite amazing what they achieved, especially when you consider that they had no metal picks, or spades, or wheelbarrows. In fact, the most sophisticated tools they had at the time were made from the very flint they were mining.
Did you try you hand at flint shaping?
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