A shot from 3rd June 2010. A touch of HDR processing from a RAW file. Had it all to myself. Spent several hours (yes hours) in the visitors centre just staring at the Ochre Horse. It is truly mesmerising.
Well worth a visit if you live within 12,000 miles !!
Enjoy
Blingo
This one is carved in bas-relief and really stands out from the wall. August 2007
Bison-like carving. Not easy to see in the photo but absolutely magical when seen in real life as it is just above head height from what I recall. August 2007
A dubious carving. see miscellaneous post
themodernantiquarian.com/post/55173
A dubious carving – see miscellaneous post
themodernantiquarian.com/post/55173
A dubious carving: see miscellaneous post
themodernantiquarian.com/post/55173
The first example of prehistoric cave art to have been re-discovered in the UK. Engraved on this panel is a stag, looking left. If you can’t make it out amongst the modern graffiti, then check out the black outline in the next photo. Note the vertical lines engraved into the bottom of the panel.
Public release photograph showing the carving of the stag and other figures in the Church Hole Cave.
A small area of the ceiling of Church Hole Cave, showing an engraving/bas relief of a bird’s head thought to have been fashioned in the Upper Palaeolithic. It’s officially described as “a beautiful and unique depiction of a bird-head with a long curved bill”. I disagree. The more I look at it, the more I see a bird with a fish in its mouth.
This replica of a horse drawn on a piece of rib bone found in Robin Hood’s Cave depicts the only object of portable art portraying an animal from the Upper Palaeolithic yet to be found in Britain. It is on display at the Creswell Crags’ Visitor Centre. The original is in the British Museum, not on display at present.
(Update: In July 2009 I saw the original artefact in the new Visitor Centre at Creswell Crags, on loan from the B.M.)
Cave Spider (Meta menardi) in its lair on the roof of Robin Hood’s Cave, Creswell Crags
09/04. Looking down the gorge from the dam.
09/04. Church Hole Cave from the waters edge.
Usually, there is strictly no admittance to Church Hole Cave. Here it is: with the door unlocked, my hard hat waiting to be donned, and the steps inside leading to the temporary viewing platform – from which I viewed the first prehistoric cave art to be re-discovered in Britain, on and near to the ceiling. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take my camera inside.
Inside of Robin Hood’s Cave.
View along the southern line of caves, the ones to the north are heavily overgrown.
Robin Hood’s Cave
11/03 The Boat House Cave.
Medieval vandalism?
If there is a gateway to hell, a portal from the underworld used by demons and witches to wreak their evil havoc on humanity, then it could be in a small east Midlands cave handy for both the M1 and A60.
Heritage experts have revealed what is thought to be the biggest concentration of apotropaic marks, or symbols to ward off evil or misfortune, ever found in the UK.
The markings, at Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge on the Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire border, include hundreds of letters, symbols and patterns carved, at a time when belief in witchcraft was widespread. The scale and variety of the marks made on the limestone walls and ceiling of a cave which has at its centre a deep, dark, hole, is unprecedented....
theguardian.com/culture/2019/feb/15/nottinghamshire-cave-carvings-marks-scare-witches
Britain is nominating a judicious mixture of natural, built and industrial sites, including the slate industry of north Wales with its spectacular shale heaps still bearing witness to the days when Welsh slate roofed half the world, the Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire, Scotland’s beautiful Flow Country, the endlessly repainted Forth railway bridge which had the longest single cantilever span in the world when built in 1890, Gorham’s cave complex in Gibraltar, and Cresswell Crags, the limestone gorge honeycombed with caves which has some of the earliest evidence of human habitation in Britain and the country’s only known Ice Age rock art.
guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/mar/22/uk-nominations-world-heritage-status
Published Date: 08 May 2009
By sjb
IT may have been around for millions of years, but Creswell Crags has often remained something of a mystery to generations of local people.
But all that has changed, thanks to a £14 million investment in the site to make it more visitor-friendly than it has ever been before.
Around £4.5 million of the cash has paid for a brand new on-site museum and education centre – a magnificent building created to help people to take a look at and even change their established view of pre-history in the UK
And now, with the building work completed the move into the new premises has finally begun
Anticipating the event, site manager Nigel Mills had said that pre-history had always started with the Romans, taken a brief look at Stonehenge and that was about it..........
Much more here.....
worksopguardian.co.uk/news/New-45-million-visitor-centre.5244738.jp
“Notts County Council has agreed in principle to increasing its funding for Creswell Crags Heritage Trust. The authority currently gives £38,000 to support one of Britain’s most important archaeological and geological sites. Over the past six years a £6m programme has been undertaken to improve facilities. The trust is bidding for money to develop a new visitor centre and museum to attract tourism. The county has agreed to put up its yearly contribution by £14,000 from 2009/2010. But the increase is subject to the trust creating a sound business plan and the funds being available.”
In adjunct to Rhiannon’s post below, some details of Dr Pettitt and his team’s discoveries in the paleolithic strata of Creswell Crags, are availble from the 24hr museum here
Sheffield archaeologists are working with the British museum at Creswell Crags for the next two weeks, in the first major investigation at the site since the 1920s. Church Hole was excavated in the 1870s – the archaeologists will be examining the Victorian spoil heap outside the cave entrance, which will be full of vital clues to the lives of the people and animals that used the cave during the Ice Age. The museum will be running a series of activities including regular tours to the site.
summarised from the article at
sheffieldtoday.net/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=58&ArticleID=1682947
Britain’s first cave art is more than 12,800 years old, scientific testing has shown. Engravings of a deer and other creatures at Creswell Crags, in Derbyshire, have proved to be genuine Ice Age creations, and not modern fakes, as some had feared.
The engravings were found in 2003 at two caves, Church Hole and Robin Hood’s Cave, which lie close together in the Creswell gorge. Palaeolithic occupation deposits dating to the last Ice Age were excavated there in 1875-76, but the art remained unnoticed. Although the most notable finds were from 15,000-13,000 years ago, even older tools were noted, some dating to the Middle Palaeolithic between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, others a few millennia later.
Read the full article here
timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,61-1910329,00.html
A Derbyshire museum has been given £4.26m to expand its facilities.
The money will be spent on building a centre of excellence at Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge which contains the country’s oldest cave art.
The grant has come from the Heritage Lottery Fund and will pay for a new museum and education centre telling the story of the Ice Age.
Plans are now being drawn up, and if approved, work could start next year, with the centre opening in 2007.
Ancient land
The trust which runs the site will have to find £1m towards the project.
The carvings include a 12,000-year-old representation of bison, horse and birds.
They are the only examples of Palaeolithic cave art in the UK, and the artists who made them would have witnessed a British landscape still being shaped by glaciers.
A local road will also be re-routed to protect the site.
From the BBCi-Derbyshire website. A similar article featured on www.24hourmuseum.co.uk
An English cave has been described as the “Sistine Chapel of the Ice Age” after the discovery of 80 engraved figures in its limestone ceiling.
The discovery at Creswell Crags was announced on Tuesday.
It comes a year after the initial discovery of 12 engraved figures, which were trumpeted as the earliest examples of prehistoric cave art in Britain.
The new discoveries were made possible by the good natural light in April and June, rock art experts said.
Creswell Crags – a Site of Special Scientific Interest – lies on the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. It comprises a gorge and many caves.
The latest artwork, dated to be about 13,000 years old, was found in an opening in the rock known as Church Hole, in Nottinghamshire.
Scientist Dr Sergio Ripoll, from Spain’s Open University, said: “’The good natural light both in April and June of this year, and the realisation that the Ice Age artists who were visiting Church Hole were actually modifying the natural shapes in the limestone, has enabled us to see many new animal figures.”
The figures include representations of bison, deer, bears, plus two or three species of bird; including one unusual bird head with a long, curved bill.
British rock art expert Dr Paul Bahn said: “The sunny mornings especially provided an opportunity to see the cave illuminated by a brilliant reflected light, presumably how our Ice Age ancestors meant for the art to be experienced.”
Dr Nigel Mills, manager of the Creswell Heritage Trust, said the discoveries were “absolutely fantastic news”.
“Church Hole cave is really the Sistine Chapel of the Ice Age,” he said.
Although older cave art in France and Spain is regarded as more sophisticated, the Creswell images are deemed to be significant because of their northerly position.
They are the only examples of Palaeolithic cave art in the UK, and the artists who made them would have witnessed a British landscape still being shaped by glaciers.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/3890113.stm
***Thanks to Mrs Goffik for this link!***
From the THES 9/7/04;
It’s Brit Art, but not as we know it
Steve Farrar
Published: 09 July 2004
The cave engravings emerged first, then shadowy bas-reliefs. Steve Farrar reports
The finest collection of Ice Age bas-relief sculpture found on a cave ceiling is as elusive as it is beautiful. Indeed, the experts who will soon officially announce the discovery overlooked its existence during a preliminary survey.
A search of Church Hole, a cave in Creswell Crags, near Worksop, Nottinghamshire, last year first revealed engraved – as opposed to bas-relief – images of horses, bison, red deer and possibly a wolf that are probably more than 13,000 years old.
Until then, the Ice Age residents of Britain were widely considered impoverished cousins of continental Europeans who produced rich cave paintings and carvings.
But even as that image crumbles, the team admits that the most astonishing achievements of the Creswellian artists initially evaded detection.
“We’d seen no bas-relief before,” says Paul Bahn, an independent scholar and leading Ice Age art expert. “When we first saw the horse’s head, we thought it was a trick of the light.”
The oversight is forgivable. At first glance, only the natural cracks and bumps of the limestone are evident in the cave. But with expert guidance, a menagerie of animals can be espied in the gloom.
Chaotically aligned, overlapping figures peer out from every corner. First come the engraved outlines, which reveal a sophisticated understanding of the animals’ physiology. Then comes the bas-relief, formed by chipping away rock to leave images proud of their background.
Many combine natural features suggestive of an animal with sculpted elements such as an eye, ear or muzzle. Among them is a large brown bear and the horse – a haunting image with a bas-relief mane – whose mouth is formed by a white chip of mineral in the rock.
Paul Pettitt, lecturer in human origins at Sheffield University, who organised the search for UK cave art with Dr Bahn 18 months ago, notes how a minimum of elaboration was often enough to complete the picture.
“They bring out the ghost of these animals’ form,” he says.
When the experts began the work, they dared not imagine they would enjoy such success. Dr Pettitt and Dr Bahn were joined by Sergio Ripoll, a leading Ice Age art specialist at the Spanish Open University, who is renowned for having “the eyes” to detect previously unrecognised cave art.
They started at Creswell Crags, where traces of Ice Age people had been found. Twenty minutes after entering Church Hole something caught Dr Ripoll’s eye.
“I saw a line and suddenly a head was there. I then said a very big bad word in Spanish – it was so exciting,” Dr Ripoll says. He had found the outline of what later turned out to be a red deer stag.
Since then, up to 81 possible pictures have come to light, most emerging since international experts descended on Creswell in April to discuss the discoveries.
The artists are thought to have been the first hunter-gatherers to return to Britain after the last Ice Age.
Dr Pettitt says the artwork suggests strong cultural links between the people of Creswell Crags and their counterparts elsewhere on the great plain that once linked Britain to Germany.
The experts admit they can only guess what the pictures meant to the artists, though their sheer number suggests they were intensely personal.
Dr Pettitt interprets boomerang-shaped figures found deep in the cave as highly stylised depictions of dancing women similar to those found on the continent. His colleagues are not convinced.
“We still argue for hours and bounce ideas about,” Dr Bahn says.
The evidence is still coming in. It seems likely that Church Hole was completely covered in pictures, while the handful of images identified in other Creswell caves makes it possible that the entire gorge was decorated.
The pictures might even have been brightly painted – a possibility that infra-red imaging could soon confirm.
With more discoveries possible elsewhere in Britain, it seems the original exponents of Brit Art are finally getting recognition.
The people who created the first surviving art in Britain were committed Europeans, belonging to a common culture spanning France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, according to the man who discovered the cave art in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire (England). The discovery of 13,000-year-old rock paintings in Nottinghamshire last year rewrote ice-age history in Britain. Archaeologists from all over Europe met in Creswell to discuss how the finds form part of a continent-wide culture known as the Magdalenian.
Paul Pettitt, of Sheffield University’s archaeology department, said: “The Magdalenian era was the last time that Europe was unified in a real sense and on a grand scale.” According to Mr Pettitt, the artists behind the Creswell paintings would have spent summers in the area feasting on migrating reindeer, but the winters on lowlands which now form the North sea or in the Netherlands or central Rhine areas. They would have kept in close contact, possibly through yearly meetings, with people in the middle Rhine, the Ardennes forest and the Dordogne. At the time it was possible to walk from Nottinghamshire to the Dordogne. “The importance of art for the Magdalenians is clear,” said Mr Pettitt. “It helped to reaffirm their common cultural affiliation.”
Of particular interest on the Creswell paintings is a depiction of an ibex, an animal now only to be found in Europe in the Pyrenees. “Not one ice-age ibex bone has been found in Britain. The nearest ibex remains [from the period] were found in Belgium and mid-Germany,” said Mr Pettitt. He said the most likely explanation is that Magdalenians saw ibexes elsewhere and painted them in Creswell as a reminder.
Other shapes found at Creswell were initially thought to be long-necked birds. “Looked at another way,” said Mr Pettitt, “You see a naked women in profile, with jutting out buttocks and raised arms. It appears to be a picture of women doing a dance in which they thrust out their derrières. It’s stylistically very similar to continental examples, and seems to demonstrate that Creswellians are singing and dancing in the same way as on the continent.”
The cave complex and attendant museum attract 28,000 visitors a year. The museum trust has submitted a £4 million bid to the lottery heritage fund to improve access to the site. Jon Humble, inspector of ancient monuments for English Heritage, called it “the best and most successful example of an archaeology-led project for social and economic regeneration anywhere in the UK”.
Source: The Guardian (15 April 2004) & Stone Pages
From Yorkshiretoday.co.uk
THE discovery of 12,000-year-old artwork on the walls of a North Derbyshire cave could spur on a bid for World Heritage Site status.
The momentous find at Creswell Crags is believed to give the clearest evidence yet of how far north man had travelled during the ice ages. But while archaeologists are still in raptures over the images, mostly depicting animals, trust chiefs running the site believe it could spell great things for the area.
Nigel Mills, of Creswell Heritage Trust, said the paintings – thought to be Britain’s first ever cave pictures – could mean the resurrection of an ambitious scheme to gain World Heritage Site status.
He said: “Creswell Crags is a hugely important site. The quality and the quantity of archeological evidence which has come from the site are second to none. At the time when these paintings were made the crags would have been at the very edge of the ice sheet which covered much of the North of England. The paintings are evidence that the crags were the most northerly place visited by ice age man. For these reasons the crags are unique places – and something that is so unique could form the basis of a bid to be a World Heritage Site. In 1996, a bid was put forward but was rejected. In the light of recent events it may now be appropriate to reconsider that application.”
The Creswell Crags site has come a long way in the intervening years when it was blighted by the nearby location of a sewage works and a busy road cutting through the gorge. Major progress has already been made on moving the sewage works and diverting a section of the B6042 road. The trust, set up in 1990 to safeguard the site, is leading a £14m scheme to regenerate the former coalfield area. Part of the scheme will see the construction of a £4.5m museum and visitor centre which it is hoped will secure the long-term future of the site.
The earliest-known example of prehistoric cave art in Britain could get a new £4.5m museum. A lottery bid is being prepared to allow the cave art to go on public view, although the exact details have yet to be worked out.
Read more at: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3084155.stm
Chesterfield Today
chesterfieldtoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=728&ArticleID=556923
Historians are planning a new £4.5m museum to showcase Britain’s first cave art after it was discovered at a Derbyshire attraction.
Ice Age engravings dating back 12,000 years were uncovered by a team of archaeologists investigating Creswell Crags. The sketchings, which include an ibex — an antelope-like creature — have forced a rethink of the life of prehistoric Britons.
John Humble, inspector of ancient monuments for English Heritage, said: “The text books say that there is no cave art in Britain. They will now have to be re-written. The specialist team are to be congratulated on making a very important scientific discovery.”
For the moment the paintings — some of which were covered by modern day graffiti — are not on view. But crags bosses hope the drawings will act as the catalyst for a new £4.5m museum which will showcase them and other artefacts.
Nigel Mills, manager of the Creswell Heritage Trust, said: “These discoveries confirm the importance of Creswell Crags in global terms as one of the most northerly places to have been visited by our ancestors during the Ice Age. Cave art has been found in at least three caves, and this provides a very visual and vivid addition to the Creswell Crags story, and to the story of Ice Age Britain as a whole.”
A bid for Heritage Lottery Fund money is being prepared for submission next month.
Mr Mills added: “The current visitor facilities are far too small and dilapidated. We need more space in order for us to move forward and to develop museum and educational facilities befitting the importance of the site.”
The museum plan is the latest in a series of initiatives announced in a £14m re-vamp of the Creswell area.
Severn Trent Water has shelled out £4m to relocate sewage works from the site, and £1.5m scheme will take place over the next 18 months to re-route the main road which runs through the gorge.
Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday June 15, 2003
The Observer
Archaeologists have discovered 12,000-year-old engravings carved by ancient Britons in a cave in Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. The depiction of the animals – which include a pair of birds – is the first example of prehistoric cave art in Britain.
The discovery – by Paul Bahn and Paul Pettitt, with Spanish colleague Sergio Ripoll – is set to trigger considerable scientific excitement, for it fills a major gap in the country’s archeological record.
‘If this is verified, it represents a wonderful discovery,’ said Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, London. ‘There are fine examples of cave art in Spain and France but none has been found here – until now.‘
Full story at:
observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,977770,00.html
Visited 1.5.14
This was the highlight of the week for me.
I was looking forward to visiting Creswell gorge and I wasn’t disappointed.
We parked in the car park and myself and Dafydd headed for the visitor’s centre. Karen stayed in the car with Sophie who was asleep.
A sign said that there had recently been a fire and some of the exhibits had been temporarily removed. Because of this the entry fee was reduced to a bargain £2 for me and £1 for Dafydd. This caused me some alarm but I needn’t had worried as the bone engravings of the horse and ‘Pin Hole Man’ were still on display.
My face lit up as I was actually able to see these famous engravings in real life!
After spending a fair bit of time looking around the other exhibits we headed out across the meadow towards the caves. The escorted tours only run on the weekend which was disappointing but we were still able to walk around the gorge. We stopped at each information board and looked through the metal bars into the caves. Some of the smaller caves were not barred and Dafydd had great fun ‘exploring’ these little recesses.
It was the only non-sunny day of the holiday. The weather being still but foggy. This only added to the atmosphere.
This is a great place to come and I would heartily recommend a visit if you are ever in the area. I certainly plan to come back one day (on a weekend) when I can have a tour of the caves and see the cave art for myself.
Visited 6/4/08, and took the Rock Art Tour. This costs six pounds, which some might say was pretty dear for a couple of definite images and a couple of possibles.
Having said that, the moment when you ‘see’ the reindeer carving reveal itself from under the modern graffiti and natural markings as the guide outlines it with her laser pointer is pretty incredible.
Our guide was very good with the children in the group, some of whom were quite young. There are no restrictions on photographing the art, although you are advised not to use a flash, this is because you get better pictures without then with.
As others have said, the gorge seems to have been transplanted into a very bog-standard midlands landscape from elsewhere. According to our guide there are some other smaller ones nearby some of which also had rock shelters.
Completely non-MA, but a short walk to the E of the site along Robin Hoods Way takes you to the remains of subterranean structures built by the ‘Mole’ Duke of Portland in the C19th including a chapel and art gallery. Strange to have such an unconscious echo of the ancient past constructed in the industrial era....
Two days have past and I am still in awe and wonderment at the sights I saw at the weekend. I took the opportunity to book up to see the cave art within Church Hole Cave – and what an opportunity it turned out to be! For over half an hour I stood on the temporary viewing platform which had been erected to coincide with the cave art conference which took place nearby. I had an image of an animal, drawn by a human in the Palaeolithic, within six inches of my nose! My head was within inches of other animals and images which have yet to be fully interpreted! I feel privileged; no – I AM privileged – to have been allowed in to Church Hole Cave and to be shown the first prehistoric cave art to have been re-discovered in Britain.
As Stubob says Creswell Crags is a little lost world, as you drive in from the west the cliff faces and the lake make a welcome change from the surrounding area which I found uniformly run-down and depressing (apologies to anybody who lives locally) While you’re there you can take a tour of Robin Hood’s Cave, you get to wear a hard hat with miners lamp and are shown a short way into the cave by a knowledgeable guide who gives a potted history of the site and passes round various bones and flints to illustrate different occupation periods – most of these flints are modern replicas though. It’s not the most wildly exiting tour but our guide was enthusiastic and certainly knew her stuff, she was more than capable of answering any questions fired at her. The tour is £2.75 for adults and lasts around an hour and a quarter including walking time.
Pleased to see that Stubob’s put this site on the map. I’ve visited this place a couple of times but sadly have no photos to post here.
A strange place this – I recollect that the air was very still last time we visited, almost oppressive. Visually this is similar to a scaled down version of Cheddar Gorge but, thankfully without the tourist coaches parked at the bottom. The caves are largely fenced off from the public but a winding walk around the valley floor takes the visitor past each fancifully named cave.
***
Whilst you’re in “the Dukeries” pop into the grounds of nearby Rufford Park for some food and a look at the gallery. I’ve posted up a review on the facilities section.
According to W B Dawkins’ 1880 “Early Man in Britain” (an excerpt online at Showcaves.com),
the ‘Pin Hole Cave’ is so called because people used to drop a pin in (for luck? for a wish? as an offering?) – part of the ritual being that they took away a pin left by another visitor previously.
showcaves.com/english/gb/showcaves/CreswellCragsDawkins.html#3
A spooky modern story connected with the Crags, summarised from Liz Linahan’s account in her ‘More pit ghosts, padfeet and poltergeists’ (1995):
One evening a couple were driving home past the crags, and stopped at some temporary traffic lights just near the visitors’ centre. The woman glanced out of her window and caught sight of a pale blurred circular shape in the briars next to her, about 2ft from the ground. As she watched it started floating back and forth (though the briars were really dense) and she saw it begin to take on the features of ‘an old hag’ with dark eyes and a beaked nose, and then hollow cheeks and long hair. At first she thought it must be a prank – but then felt scared and became convinced it was ‘something paranormal’. The face moved towards the car and the woman (not unreasonably) screamed, causing her husband to turn round – he said he saw the face briefly before stepping on the accelerator. The woman was so shaken when she got home that the doctor had to be called, and her husband and some police went back to the crags to investigate. They were bemused because entry inside the brambles was nigh on impossible, and one of the policemen ripped his coat trying to do so.
Also that night, around dawn, a lorry driver was driving along the same stretch of road when he had to brake hard and swerve to avoid a ‘dark mysterious figure’ crossing the road from the visitors’ centre side, where it disappeared into the bushes. Shaken, he described it as ‘floating’ and ‘seemingly headless’. He described it as female although there were no particular features that made it so.
Excavations at Mother Grundy’s Parlour, Creswell Crags, Derbyshire, 1924.
A. Leslie Armstrong
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 55. (Jan. – Jun., 1925), pp. 146-175.
This article suggests the carvings show a bison, a reindeer and a rhinoceros. The rhinoceros seems the least convincing interpretation, especially when the other animals are carefully observed. To me it looks more like baza’s photo of the bird carving in Church Hole, perhaps; it has got a line down the middle of the ‘beak’.
I see no mention of these carvings on the Creswell Crags website?
I have added tracings of Armstrong’s drawings to the ‘diagrams’ section above. The carvings are an inch or two across. The photos in the article aren’t very enlightening for extra detail because the outlines of the animals have been highlighted in some way.
***
Today (21/3/09) I have been reading an article by Paul G Bahn – one of the discoverers of the Palaeolithic art at Cresswell. He says (rather as I had thought) that the three finds I’ve traced are Rather Dubious. Armstrong was very apt at finding art in all sorts of places, including Grimes Graves – at one point he believed it was a palaeolithic site. The thing is, he might not have been cheating, he may just have been the victim of wishful thinking. It’s easy to see all sorts of things in a mish mash of lines if you want to. He was there when the famous ‘chalk goddess’ was found at GG – Bahn says “it’s by no means clear whether Armstrong made the piece himself [...] or was the victim of a hoax.” The famous ‘Pin Hole Cave man’ mentioned by stubob below is also one of Armstrong’s ‘discoveries’.
All very interesting anyway. The Bahn’s article is ‘The Historical Background to the Discovery of Cave Art at Cresswell Crags’, which is in the book ‘Palaeolithic Cave Art at Creswell Crags in European Context’ (Pettitt, Bahn and Ripoll) 2007.
Bahn also discusses the engraved horse that was found in the Robin Hood cave – there was controversy about it over many years. Consensus seems to be that it is genuinely palaeolithic – but just that it might not really have originated in the cave. It might have travelled very recently from France and been Planted. It was found by the Revd J. M. Mello.
Well. As Bahn says, “it is supremely ironic that the very objects which drew us to search Creswell Crags for cave art and to discover it there [...] may perhaps be a planted intrusion in one case, and illusory and non-existent in the others.”
creswell-crags.org.uk/virtuallytheiceage/Exploring_objects/Large%20image.asp?VTIA=51
This horse’s head is carved on a bison rib and was the first Creswellian art found in the gorge.
A recent study and reinterpretation of the piece suggests the carved vertical strokes to be corral fencing.
The open ended gorge is thought to have been used as a large natural trap, fences being erected across its span to trap the animals.
There seems to have been 3 main occupation periods at the site which was used as a summer camp by groups following herds of reindeer, bison, mammoth and horses. The first group were Neanderthals from 50000 years ago onwards, then the first modern humans were here around 30000 years ago. The last group left their Creswell Points and bone carvings as well as the recently discovered wall engravings about 11-13000 years ago. Sporadic evidence of use of the caves continues through the prehistoric period. A great deal of information has been lost however as the Victorians actually used explosives to excavate some of the caves On the plus side, when plans were being made to lay a railway through the gorge the land owner thwarted them by damming the stream and creating the modern lake – nice one!
The larger caves are located on the North side (the South side is in Nottinghamshire).
Mother Grundys Parlour where flints and split bones have been found.
The Pin Hole which had a bone with a carved human figure and
Robin Hood’s Cave which also contained engraved bones.
Creswell Crags has around 24 caves and shelters in the steep sided limestone crags. They can only be viewed through the iron gates in the mouth of the cave. Finds suggest the caves were in use periodically from 43,000BC through to medieval times.
It is like a little lost world down by the lake/stream that runs through the crags....only spoilt by the sewage farm between the crags and the visitors centre.....
11/03/03
I visited here again in March and was surprised to see the sewage farm had gone! Re-placed by a picnic looking area. It certainly makes a difference not having to walk past the sewage beds to the crags.....alot kinder on the nose too.
Samuel Hieronymous Grimm’s painting, 1785, of the gorge before the dam.
An engraving of a man on a woolly rhinoceros bone found in Pin Hole Cave – thought to be from the upper Palaeolithic, 12,000 years ago. Though whether it’s truly from this cave or not is another matter (see misc posts).
“The presentation discusses, firstly, theory and suitability of the use of 3D scanners to record rock art, secondly, some results of Archaeoptics’ use of this technology in recording rock art at Creswell Crags.”
(1.5mb pdf file).
Good article from the International Newsletter on Rock Art
No. 40 2004 by the Bradshaw Foundation. Some good photos and sketches of the engravings in the Church Hole Cave.
Paul Bahn’s article on the long awaited discovery of Ice Age art in Britain.
New Discoveries of Cave Art in Church Hole (Creswell Crags, England)
An updated report on the Church Hole Cave’s engravings.
Home of the Ice Age hunter.
