AT HANGMAN'S WOOD, GRAYS.
243
inches of soil. That these pits were primarily flint mines their
construction, as revealed to us by Canon Greenwell, Lieut.-General
Pitt-Rivers, and Mr. Park Harrison, makes certain.
We may now approach the pits known as "deneholes," "dane-
holes" or "danes-holes," which abound in certain parts of the chalky
districts of Kent and Essex, and were once numerous on the
Magnesian Limestone of the coast of Durham. The name means
simply den-hole, from the A. Saxon denn, a cave. Mr. Skeat gives
as cognate forms the 0. Dutch denne and the German tenne, = floor,
threshing-floor, cave. Pits in chalk having been sunk at various
periods for various purposes, there are doubtless many here and
6 These pits were described by Mr. Spurrell ("Archaeological Journal," vol. xxxvii., 333) in
a note under the title, "Account of Neolithic Flint Mines at Crayford, Kent." The author in
his paper on "Deneholes'' subsequently corrected the erroneous description of these pits as
"flint-mines." One of the pits measured from the surface of the ground to the chalk about 18 ft.,
thence to the floor 17 ft. 6 in. "From this floor rose an obtuse cone of sandy clay, very hard,
six feet high, washed in very slowly and evenly by the rain. In the cone were found several
flakes, worked scrapers and a 'core,' but no pottery ; above this lay coarser soil, several sorts
of pottery, some made with shells, some with chalk, and ornamented by the finger-nail; higher
up still Roman pottery, a fine Samian plate, and bones and rubbish to the surface." Among the
bones were those of a small deer, and Bos longifrons, and there were plenty of shells of the banded
snail, and oyster shells, both apparently the remains of food.—Fd.