№ 21Underground · Norfolk, England
Grime's Graves
A lunar field of craters in the Breckland — and a nine-metre ladder down into a Stone Age flint mine.
Photographs Jon Wilson-Bright (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Adrian Farwell (CC BY 3.0) · David P Howard (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
From the air it looks like a bombardment: over four hundred grassed-over craters pocking the heath. Each is a filled-in mineshaft, dug with antler picks around 4,500 years ago by people chasing the seam of jet-black floorstone flint that runs beneath the Breckland.
One shaft is open. You climb down a nine-metre ladder into cool chalk galleries and crouch where the miners crouched, their pick-marks still crisp in the walls. It is the only Neolithic flint mine in Britain you can enter, and the closest thing England has to time travel.
The knowledge
- Getting there
- Signed off the A134 between Thetford and Brandon, in Thetford Forest; English Heritage, open roughly spring to autumn. The mine descent has age and height limits.
- Best time
- A quiet weekday — the shaft takes a few people at a time, and the wait is shadeless.
- Local tip
- Look for the 'grime' in the name: it's Grim — Woden — the Anglo-Saxons' guess at who could have dug such a thing.
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