Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/135

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NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATION
127

deposits associated with it, but in the mean-time I may state that I have found worked flints—flakes and cores—in two localities on the Pembrokeshire coast in positions which correspond with that of the stratum of blue clay below the forest-bed of St. Helier. These flints were clearly worked by men who inhabited the woodland, now submerged, before the trees fell into decay and formed the peaty mass of trunks, branches, leaves, etc., overlying the true root-bed of the 'submerged forest.' One locality near Amroth in Carmarthen Bay yielded cores and flakes in abundance; the circumstances indicate the existence of a chipping-floor or implement factory on this part of the submerged land-surface, which now, during spring-tides, is covered by no less than twenty feet of water. In the patch of submerged forest recently exposed at Freshwater West, in southern Pembrokeshire, a few small implements were also found.

"Both at Amroth and Freshwater West the flints occurred below the peaty layer in a thin blue slime or clayey silt, which rests in turn upon clayey rubble largely composed of material derived from older superficial deposits. There is evidence that the forest trees in Pembrokeshire are rooted either in unquestionable boulder clay or in a clayey drift allied to the glacial deposits. "The geological horizon of the worked flints of the Pembrokeshire submerged land-surface appears identical with that of the