- Light grey clay and sand1 ft.
- Irregular bed of coarse gravel in which the implement was found1 ft.
- Light grey clay, mottled brown, containing fresh-water shells (Bithinia)2 ft. 4 in.
Boulder clay.
This trench was sunk at the margin of the deposit, not far from where the beds appear to crop out on the side of the hill, the previous section being about eighty yards distant, and the surface of the ground at that point higher by some feet. It will be observed that the beds of sand, gravel, and clay containing freshwater shells and peaty matter there attain a thickness of about twenty-five feet greater than in the trench, and therefore that they dip in the opposite direction to the slope of the hill. The character of the deposit is evidently fluviatile or lacustrine, and the beds, more especially those of clay, seem to become thicker as we approach the middle of the lake or river. The configuration of the surface of the country when this deposit was formed, must, however, have been widely different from what it is at present, as the high ground surrounding the lake or forming the bank of the river, and from which the successive beds must have been washed down, has, as Mr. Frere long ago observed, now disappeared; for skirting one side of the brick-field, and at the base of the hill on the slope of which the beds of drift crop out, is a valley watered by a small brook, a tributary of the Waveney.
There can be no question that these beds of drift, like those of similar character at Abbeville and Amiens, are entirely undisturbed. At this spot they rest upon the boulder clay of geologists, and are consequently of more recent date, though probably more ancient than the great mass of superficial gravel of the district, by which they in turn seem to be overlaid.
Hoxne is not, however, the only place in England where flint implements have been found under such conditions, for another weapon of the spear-head form has been obligingly pointed out to me in the collection at the British Museum, by Mr. Franks, and is thus described in the Sloane Catalogue:—
"No. 246. A British weapon, found with elephant's tooth, opposite to black Mary's, near Grayes inn lane—Conyers. It is a large black flint, shaped into the figure of a spear's point. K.[1]" This implement is engraved in Plate XVI. and is
- ↑ This K. signifies that it formed a portion of Kemp's collection; a rude engraving of it illustrates a letter on the antiquities of London by Mr. Bagford dated 1715, printed in Hearne's edition of Leland's Collectanea, vol. i. p. lxiii. From his account it seems to have been found with a skeleton of an elephant in the presence of Mr. Conyers.
