Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
FIG
307.
Pingo remains near East Walton (Fig. 294,
c9
), 10 km east of King's Lynn.
(Copyright Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service & Derek A. Edwards)
The photograph of the Grimes Graves area (Fig. 308) shows, in the background,
the forest cover now typical of much of the Breckland. In the foreground, large num-
bers of craters are the relicts of the Neolithic flint mining for which Grimes Graves
is famous. English Heritage provides access to some of these small mines, where the
flints can be examined in the position in which they originally grew in the Chalk. The
flints were used by Neolithic people to make knives, axe heads and spear heads by
careful chipping ('knapping'). At Grimes Graves there are about 500 mines spread over
an area of 6 hectares, many of them reaching a special seam of flints in the Chalk where
the miners cut horizontal galleries from the main vertical shafts. Deer antlers were used
to hammer, lever and rake the flints from the rock, before hauling them to the surface
in baskets. Flint knapping is still carried out today by a few experts and there is still a
small demand for flint chips for reproduction flint-lock firearms.
Much of the forestry in the Breckland was planted by the Forestry Commission
in the 1920s to add value to the ground and to limit soil erosion by the wind. Parts
of Thetford Forest have also been used for many years for military training. In earlier
times, this empty country was used for hunting by royalty, and today it is once again
becoming popular for recreation: Center Parcs is just one of the many tourist develop-
ments of recent years.
