A few pics of the last couple of days...
Monday:
Took so many views of Langdale, hard to do it justice! Just thinking about walking up this far is making my legs hurt again...
But this is why we were here:
The waste products of a thousand or more years of stone axe manufacture. Neolithic folk came up here, 4 to 5000 years ago, maybe earlier, and extracted this stuff from outcrops using sticks, antler picks, hammer stones and fire, and the resulting axes were traded right across the country...
I opted out of the scramble around Pike O'Stickle...
Tuesday:
Grimes Graves:
Each of these depressions was once the shaft of a flint mine:
Being 'experts' we got to go down the one the public can't...
The vertical shaft leads into horizontal galleries (only a couple of feet high) that the seams of flint came out of... (the flash is flooding the scene with light - we were seeing by torch)
Here's the good stuff they were after:
All dug out with picks like these (these really are 5000 year old deer antlers, not modern props...!)
A bit dusty, crawling through the chalk, but an amazing experience! I do wish I didn't look quite so much like a startled rabbit, but hey, it's hard to be glamorous 50 feet underground in a hard hat!