Page:VCH Bedfordshire 1.djvu/64

A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE of Recent alluvium usually flanked on either side by Pleistocene gravel forming a bed from 10 to 20 feet thick resting on Oolitic strata at a considerably higher level than the present surface of the river. Between Felmersham and Bedford the river is very sinuous, below Oakley the gravel exceeds a mile in width, and below Bedford its width exceeds 2 miles, in places extending to 4 miles. At Tempsford, where the Ivel joins the Ouse, the bed of gravel narrows to about a mile in width. The Ivel and the Hiz have formed similar but less extensive beds of gravel along their courses, and so has the Lea, the town of Luton being situated on such a bed about half a mile in width, which extends, though narrower for the most part, to above Leagrave Marsh for some distance beyond the present source of this river. The old river-gravels of the Ouse near Bedford have been described by Sir Charles Lyell in his Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man} It was at Biddenham, about 2 miles west of Bedford, that in 1 86 1 Mr. James Wyatt first found the earliest traces of man in these gravels which here form the capping of a low hill nearly encircled by one of the windings of the river. Sir Joseph Prestwich had ascertained that the valley was bounded on both sides by Oolitic strata capped by boulder clay through which it had cut its way, and also that the gravel ' con- tained bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bos, equus, and cervus, which animals he therefore inferred must have been posterior in date to the boulder clay.' In the same gravel many land and fresh- water shells had been found by Sir John Evans. These discoveries induced Mr. Wyatt to very carefully watch the excavation of the gravel from day to day for some months, and at last he saw two well-formed implements thrown out by the workmen ' from the lowest bed of stratified gravel and sand, 1 3 feet thick, containing bones of the elephant, deer, and ox, and many freshwater shells.' The implements occurred at the base of the gravel and rested immediately on Oolitic limestone at a height of 40 feet above the present level of the river. Since then Mr. Wyatt found several other flint tools in this gravel, and also a freshwater mollusc, Hydrobia marginata, which occurs in the south of France but no longer inhabits the British Isles. Remains of Elephas antiquus have been dis- covered in the same gravel at Biddenham and elsewhere, and ' at Sum- merhouse Hill, which lies east of Bedford, lower down the valley of the Ouse, and four miles from Biddenham,' Mr. Wyatt obtained ' a flint implement associated with bones and teeth of hippopotamus.' Sir Charles Lyell concluded that the Bedford sections ' teach us that the fabricators of the antique tools and the extinct Mammalia coeval with them, were post-glacial, or, in other words, posterior to the grand submergence of central England beneath the waters of the glacial sea.' The most important discovery of flint implements in the county is that of Mr. Worthington G. Smith at Caddington, an account of which 1 First edition (1863), pp. 163-6 ; 4th ed. (1873), PP- 2I +~7- The quotations here given are from this, the List, edition.