Journal of Proceedings.
lix
doubt that an appeal to their members would place them in possession of
the funds necessary to undertake a thorough investigation of these
remarkable vestiges of ancient life in Essex.
Mr. Mackie, who was requested to speak, said he should have been very
pleased to be able to contribute any information on the subject of these
deep dene-holes. Although he believed they were almost exclusively con-
fined to Kent and Essex, that was the first time that he had actually
examined one of them, and he could not, therefore, speak with any
authority upon their nature or origin. They struck him as being
exceedingly curious, and he was glad to hear the remark of Mr. Worth-
ington Smith that the one they had examined had possibly been enlarged,
because he had detected so great a number of pick-marks. He impressed
upon the Club the necessity of proceeding in a systematic manner with
any examination that might be made, and declared that in Kent and
Yorkshire and many other places the examinations of barrows and other
antique burials had been simply nothing less than desecrations. [Hear,
hear.] They had not served a proper scientific purpose; it was not
enough to take away the skulls and a few ornaments—it was essential to
learn something of the status of the men and women of the time. He
then described an investigation which had been made in a cave in York-
shire, where they removed six inches of earth at a time, and marked
every relic upon a plan in its proper position. The result was that they
were able to tell the story of that cave completely. It had been inhabited
by a man, his wife, and their three sons, who were engaged in bronze-
casting, and had been overwhelmed by a flood. These facts could not
have been discovered but for the care which had been used. In these
dene-holes he advised that, in the absence of any great number of relics,
very great care should be taken to go down step by step. He added that
it had struck him that there was a very considerable quantity of humus
in the soil; if this proved to be so, it would suggest the question whether
these dene-holes had not been used as stores for grain.
The Rev. Brooke Lambert, President of the Lewisham and Blackheath
Scientific Association, remarked that in various parts of Blackheath
sudden subsidences of ground had been noticed, and on one particular
occasion a piece of ground nine feet in diameter fell suddenly fourteen
feet in one night. There were many speculations as to the cause of this
fall. Mr. Holmes was very decidedly of opinion that they had come
upon a dene-hole there, as one was known to exist at Eltham.* They
determined to investigate it; they dug down forty-two feet, and then
bored another forty-two feet. But the whole energy of Mr. Jackson and
his friends could not produce more than two hundred pounds for the
work, and, as they came upon rock too hard for their tools, they were
obliged to leave the work undone. They put up a stone on the spot
* See ' Report of the Committee for the Exploration of the Subsidences on Black-
heath,' with plate of sections and plans by Mr. Holmes, published by the Lewisham and
Blackheath Scientific Association (1881).