106 Miscellaneous Notes on Deneholes.
pits in chalk with vertical entrances, and naturally supposed
they were for chalk, differing only in form from the quarries
he had seen elsewhere. And being a foreigner in Britain, the
natives would not be prompt to supply him with information
easily withheld, and that might cause them, if given, the most
serious loss at some future time. Therefore if, for the sake of
argument, we exclude all evidence but documentary evidence,
it is plain that Mr. Smith's claim to have settled the question
must rest upon an utterly unsound basis.
But if Mr. Smith's opinion is by no means triumphant when
documentary evidence alone is considered, the evidence afforded
by the Hangman's Wood pits themselves is surely utterly fatal
to it. The separation of each pit from its neighbour; their
concentration where the chalk is nearly sixty feet below when
there is a broad area of bare chalk within a mile; the utter
absurdity of their position if we suppose them made either for
the supply of top-dressing or of taking a share in the chalk
export trade of the Thames; all these things combine to
show either that the Hangman's "Wood Pits were not for
chalk or that their makers were lunatics.
I regret that it has been necessary, in vindicating our pro-
posed Denehole exploration, to point out the true worth of
Mr. C. Roach Smith's so-called settlement of the question.
But the excellent work done by that eminent antiquary at
Lymne, Reculver, Richborough, and elsewhere only makes it
the more needful to show that his contribution to Denehole
literature is of a quite different order.
In conclusion, it occurs to me to note the following matter.
I have heard the statement that chalk from some depth is
better than that close to the surface, for agricultural purposes,
brought forward to show that pits such as those at Hangman's
Wood may really have been pits for chalk. It might be
deemed sufficient answer to this view to remark that the
agricultural marl-pits of Norfolk are invariably broad, open,
and shallow. But even granting the possibility that certain
people may have thought chalk from 80 ft. or 40 ft. below its
surface better than that higher up, it is evident that any
inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Grays, holding this
opinion, would surely have had sense enough to begin sinking
in the chalk itself, less than a mile W. of Hangman's Wood,
rather than deliberately choose to go through the utterly use-
less labour of first penetrating nearly sixty feet of sand and
gravel.