250 REPORT ON THE DENEHOLE EXPLORATION
made for the sake of the material extracted. And a foreigner acci-
dentally discovering secret pits—and our surface trenches showed our
deneholes to have been secret excavations—would almost necessarily
be deceived as to their use by natives of whom he made enquiries.
It seems therefore evident that the quotation from Pliny simply tends
to demonstrate the existence of deep shafts in the chalk of Britain
1,800 years ago, and leaves the probable purposes of the makers of
the Hangman's Wood, or any other pits, to be decided by the
evidence of the pits themselves. Now, Mr. Bennett's enquiries
about chalk-wells (see Appendix III.) have caused him to think
them more modern than open chalk pits, "perhaps only dating,"
he remarks, "from the middle of the last century;" while
Mr. Luke Lowsley, of Hampstead Norris, Berkshire—quoted by
Mr. Bennett as an authority on the subject—states that the
sinking of chalk-wells in that part of the country has occurred
only during the last sixty or seventy years. And Mr. Bennett's
experience of chalk-wells is, that they only exist where the chalk
is not more than fifteen feet below the surface. Even if we admit
that chalk-wells may possibly be more ancient than Mr. Bennett
and Mr. Lowsley think them, and also allow that desire for chalk
might account for shafts here and there where, as at Hangman's
Wood, it is about sixty feet below the surface, and there is plenty of
bare chalk within a mile—on what grounds can the concentration
there of more than fifty shafts in six acres be explained ? Then, why
did not the Hangman's Wood excavators—if wanting chalk—drive
galleries about seven feet high in various directions till the shafts
communicated, instead of keeping each pit carefully separated from
its neighbour, and obtaining more room, after reaching certain
dimensions horizontally, by increasing the height of the chambers,
and removing the partitions between them ? Why was the position
of mere pits for chalk so carefully kept secret, when the chalk hill-
sides around Gravesend and Purfleet were as conspicuous as the river
Thames itself ? And how could narrow-shafted pits at Hangman's
Wood have competed with chalk quarries close to the river in the
chalk export trade ? 10
An additional argument of weight against any application of the
chalk-pit hypothesis to the Hangman's Wood or Bexley deneholes
is furnished in Mr. Bennett's notes. As regards the non-permanent
10 It is worthy of note that Mr. Palin refers to the extensive works at Grays as being of ''great
age. The Registers speak of 'Smith, a Lym Burner,' buried here in 1691." See "Stifford and
its neighbourhood," page 83.