ROMANO-BRITISH DERBYSHIRE in the black mould forming the floor near the entrance). Two coins of Valentinian are said to have been discovered in this cave. 1 Anstey's cave, also near Torquay, yielded in 1825 some potsherds and one or two coins one, certainly, of Pius. 3 Finally, Ash Hole, on Berryhead near Brixham, when examined by Mr. Lyte in 1820-9, * s sa ^ to have contained Romano-British potsherds and a coin of Claudius. 8 (h] The Borness cave in Kirkcudbrightshire has yielded a bit of Samian and was apparently occupied in Roman times ; but the limits of this occupation are doubtful. 4 (A) CONCLUSION Such, summarized roughly and briefly, are the principal facts that are known about the cave-life of Derbyshire and of Britain generally during the Roman period. It remains to attempt an explanation of this cave- life, and to suggest a cause and date which will make it intelligible. The explanation usually offered is that it was the cave-life of Romano-British fugitives fleeing in the fifth or sixth century from the invading English. This theory has often been put forward, but by no one so clearly and eloquently as by the historian John Richard Green. 6 The caves of the Yorkshire moorlands preserve traces of the miserable fugitives who fled to them for shelter. Such a cave opens on the side of a lonely ravine, known now as the King's Scaur, high up in the moors beside Settle. In primaeval ages it had been a haunt of hyaenas, who dragged hither the mammoths, the reindeer, the bisons, and the bears that prowled in the neighbouring glens. At a later time it became a home of savages, whose stone adzes and flint knives and bone harpoons are still embedded in its floor. But these too vanished in their turn, and this haunt of primitive man lay lonely and undisturbed till the sword of the English invaders drove the Roman provincials for shelter to the moors. The hurry of their flight may be gathered from the relics their cave-life has left behind it. There was clearly little time to do more than to drive off the cattle, the swine, the goats, whose bones lie scattered round the hearth fire at the mouth of the cave, where they served the wretched fugitives for food. The women must have buckled hastily their brooches of bronze or parti-coloured enamel, the peculiar workmanship of Celtic Britain, and snatched up a few household implements as they hurried away. The men, no doubt, girded on as hastily the swords, whose dainty sword hilts of ivory and bronze still remain to tell the tale of their doom, and hiding in their breast what money the house contained, from coins of Trajan to the wretched ' minims ' that showed the Empire's decay, mounted their horses to protect their flight. At nightfall all were crouching beneath the dripping roof of the cave or round the fire that was blazing at its mouth, and a long suffering began in which the fugitives lost year by year the memory of the civilization from which they came. A few charred bones show how hunger drove them to slay their horses for food ; reddened pebbles mark the hour when the new vessels they wrought were too weak to stand the fire, and their meal was cooked by dropping heated stones into the pot. A time seems to have come when their very spindles were exhausted, and the women who wove in that dark retreat made spindle-whorls as they could from the bones that lay about them. 1 British A 'ssoc. Reports from 1 870; Boyd Dawkins,C<w Hunting, pp. 325 foil.; Devon. Asioc.Trans. 11.469, iii. I90,xvi. 199, etc. Dr. Brushfield has told me of the two coins,which do not appear in any published report. 2 Devon. A ssoc. vi. 64, 69, x. 1 46, 170. A coin of Trajan was found in one of these caves (Davidson, p. 78, Woollcombe MS.), and according to Mr. Worth in Anstey's Cave (Devon. Assoc. xxiii. 81). 3 Devon. Assoc. xxiii. 78, Woollcombe MS. Other coins (e.g. Nero) are also quoted, but these seem to have been found in the neighbourhood and not in the cave.
- Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot. xi. xii. ; Edinburgh Museum, HN, 1-179 5 information from Dr. J. Anderson.
6 Green, Making of England, pp. 67-68 : one or two of his details are, I think, inaccurate. So too Wright, Hist, of Leeds in the Proc. of the Geol. and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding, 1864-5, pp. 365-6 ; Boyd Dawkins, Cave Hunting, p. 109 ; Pennington, Barrows and Bone Caves of Derb. p. 59 ; C. R. Smith, Coll. Ant. i. (1848), 72. 3 1
