FLINT IMPLEMENTS OF THE VALLEY OF THE OUSE, NEAR BEDFORD.

The ancient fluviatile gravel of the valley of the Ouse, around Bedford, has been noted for the last thirty years for yielding to collectors a rich harvest of the bones of extinct mammalia. By observations made in 1854 and 1858, Mr. Prestwich had ascertained that the valley was bounded on both sides by Oolitic strata, capped by boulder clay, and that the gravel Number 3, Figure 23, contained bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, ox, horse, and deer, which animals he therefore inferred must have been posterior in date to the boulder clay, through which, as well as the subjacent Oolite, the valley had been excavated. Mr. Evans had found in the same gravel many land and freshwater shells, and these discoveries induced Mr. James Wyatt, of Bedford, to pay two visits to St. Acheul in order to compare the implement-bearing gravels of the Somme with the drift of the valley of the Ouse. After his return he resolved to watch carefully the excavation of the gravel-pits at Biddenham, 2 miles west-north-west of Bedford, in the hope of finding there similar works of art. With this view he paid almost daily visits for months in succession to those pits, and was at last rewarded by the discovery of two well-formed implements, one of the spear-head and the other of the oval shape, perfect counterparts of the two prevailing French types. Both specimens were thrown out by the workmen on the same day from the lowest bed of stratified gravel and sand, 13 feet thick, containing bones of the elephant, deer, and ox, and many freshwater shells. The two implements occurred at the depth of 13 feet from the surface of the soil, and rested immediately on solid beds of Oolitic limestone, as represented in the accompanying section (Figure 23).

Having been invited by Mr. Wyatt to verify these facts, I went to Biddenham within a fortnight of the date of his discovery (April 1861), and, for the first time, saw evidence which satisfied me of the chronological relations of those three phenomena, the antique tools, the extinct mammalia, and the glacial formation. On that occasion I examined the pits in company with Messrs. Prestwich, Evans, and Wyatt, and we collected ten species of shells from the stratified drift Number 3, or the beds overlying the lowest gravel from which the flint implements had been exhumed. They were all of common fluviatile and land species now living in the same part of England. Since our visit, Mr. Wyatt has added to them Paludina marginata, Michaud (Hydrobia of some authors), a species of the South of France no longer inhabiting the British Isles. The same geologist has also found, since we were at Biddenham, several other flint tools of corresponding type, both there and at other localities in the valley of the Ouse, near Bedford.

Figure 23. Section Across Valley of the Ouse

  (FIGURE 23. SECTION ACROSS THE VALLEY OF THE OUSE, TWO MILES
  WEST-NORTH-WEST OF BEDFORD.*
    (* Prestwich, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society"
    volume 17 1861 page 364; and Wyatt, "Geologist" 1861 page 242.)

  1. Oolitic strata.
  2. Boulder clay, or marine northern drift, rising to about
     ninety feet above the Ouse.
  3. Ancient gravel, with elephant bones, freshwater shells,
     and flint implements.
  4. Modern alluvium of the Ouse.
  a. Biddenham gravel pits, at the bottom of which flint tools
     were found.)

The boulder clay Number 2 extends for miles in all directions, and was evidently once continuous from b to c before the valley was scooped out. It is a portion of the great marine glacial drift of the midland counties of England, and contains blocks, some of large size, not only of the Oolite of the neighbourhood, but of Chalk and other rocks transported from still greater distances, such as syenite, basalt, quartz, and New Red Sandstone. These erratic blocks of foreign origin are often polished and striated, having undergone what is called glaciation, of which more will be said by and by. Blocks of the same mineral character, embedded at Biddenham in the gravel Number 3, have lost all signs of this striation by the friction to which they were subjected in the old river bed.

The great width of the valley of the Ouse, which is sometimes 2 miles, has not been expressed in the diagram. It may have been shaped out by the joint action of the river and the tides when this part of England was emerging from the waters of the glacial sea, the boulder clay being first cut through, and then an equal thickness of underlying Oolite. After this denudation, which may have accompanied the emergence of the land, the country was inhabited by the primitive people who fashioned the flint tools. The old river, aided perhaps by the continued upheaval of the whole country, or by oscillations in its level, went on widening and deepening the valley, often shifting its channel, until at length a broad area was covered by a succession of the earliest and latest deposits, which may have corresponded in age to the higher and lower gravels of the valley of the Somme, already described.

At Biddenham, and elsewhere in the same gravel, remains of Elephas antiquus have been discovered, and Mr. Wyatt obtained, January 1863, a flint implement associated with bones and teeth of hippopotamus from gravel at Summerhouse hill, which lies east of Bedford, lower down the valley of the Ouse, and 4 miles from Biddenham.

One step at least we gain by the Bedford sections, which those of Amiens and Abbeville had not enabled us to make. They teach us that the fabricators of the antique tools, and the extinct mammalia coeval with them, were all post-glacial.