Dr Doom gets side tracked yet again……….

Well this note has had a gestation period comparable to that of the Blue whale, my apologies to all for that. We have a large number of new allotmentauts on the Chertsey Road allotments and I would encourage them to look carefully at the flints they uncover as they put their new allotments back into cultivation.

The front section of Fran’s allotment had been used by the previous tenant as a car parking space, and the plan was to insert raised beds in this area because of the poverty of the soil. The area was, shall we say, well compacted, and we had to resort to a pickaxe to break up the surface, during the clear up I noticed a flint with a quite distinctive shape, which you can see in the first two photos. From the very first , this flint appeared to be quite different form all the other miscellaneous flints we’d sieved from the plot. It is about the size of a 50p piece, sits very comfortably between thumb and forefinger , and if you look closely you will see the evidence of working along the surface to form a sharp scraping edge.

Photo 1: Flint Photo 2: Flint

At this point I needed some help, and contacted Val Bott and Dr Fiona Haughey, who confirmed that it was more than likely a flint scraper, possibly of neolithic age. All well and good, a nice surprise but the real fun started when I started to look at some of the history of the Chertsey Road site and follow the ideas that Val and Fiona had provided. Val kindly provided me with a copy from her, lets be frank, extensive library and it is reproduced here as Photo 3. The scraper from Chertsey looks remarkably similar to the one described as No 17, so a result! But where did it come from , well that started me on the trail of a monograph of Neolithic Archaeology in the Intertidal Zone edited by Sidell and Haughey. As an aside it is astonishing what you discover when you type in “neolithic artefacts in Chiswick” in the search field of Google. Armed with this reference off I went to the British Library and spent a jolly afternoon roaming over west London artefacts, you can try a sample of the monograph by following the link in the sources. In summary there was a site of flint debitage ( lovely word) at the downstream end of Chiswick Eyot, that was explored in the 60s but now eroded away. I had an email exchange with Fiona and its appears that artefacts seldom move very far from their original source so it appeared unlikely that this flint was connected to that site, but apparently the spoil infill for the gravel pits could have come from anywhere in London, so sadly, that is a hiding to nothing.

Photo 3: Flint Identification

I went along to Chiswick Library reference section and the very kind librarian dug out the old maps of the Dukes Meadows area, and one of them is shown in photo 4, with a star to mark Fran’s plot. This is from the 1920s when most of the area south of the railway was used as a gravel pit as in Photo 5 from DMT’s excellent article. For the newbies , it is worth roughly locating your plot as the soil type is very much related to its position relative to the gravel pit. From experience the soil closer to the railway line tends to be more like what you would expect on a river terrace , the closer to the road the more debris appears and the plots to the south of the road appear to have a lot of miscellaneous masonry. Not sure if Fran’s plot was worked by a very clumsy clay pipe smoker but we have turned up numerous pipe stems and a couple of incomplete bowls which are Victorian according to Val, if anything looks strange it is always worth washing it off and having a closer look.

If you turn up a Golden hoard , let me know I will come and help. For a fee.

I’ll end there , but this chance discovery does fascinate as you can speculate what the Chiswick area looked like 3000 to 4000 years ago, meandering rivers and streams, dense woodland, the sacrifice of ceremonial axes, people headed for the processional way of Stanwell Cursus, up by Terminal 5, complaining why are Brentford still in Division 2, I made that last bit up……….