Creswell Crags

Our next story takes us back into the depths of prehistory, but then collides with a much more recent tale of superstition, witches, and the occult.

[ducks quacking] [instrumental music] The dig is taking place at Creswell Crags, located on the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.

It's a limestone gorge riddled with caves that have been studied by archeologists for over a century.

Those investigations revealed evidence of human activity here dating back more than 10,000 years.

So this, again, fits perfectly with Armstrong's dig.

The reason for this renewed interest in the lives of these villagers at Creswell is thanks to an incredible revelation announced in early 2019 about something which had been right under Armstrong's nose all along.

The walls of the caves at Creswell Crags are covered in strange marks scratched into the rock.

There are literally hundreds of marks scarring the wall all the way around.

How is it that objects like this have the power to take us right back to the Bronze Age?

It's almost like a, a paradox that on the one hand, uh, we talked in another, uh, podcast about the little bit of horse rib bone that was found in, in Robin Hood's Cave in Creswell Crags.

It's tiny.

It's, like, three or four inches long, but it has on it this beautiful little engraving of a horse's head and its plunging four legs.

I think that's a really nice description.

And actually just catching a blue tit, which is the most common bird that we catch, but when it's already got a ring on it, and maybe that's been ringed at a nest box over by the quarry by one of the other ringers in our group, or perhaps we ringed it at Creswell Crags and it's moved to the farm.

That is the level of intimacy that you get to learn about the birds, that you would not without knowing them as individuals and putting rings on them.

In this half-light, the mesh of the nets, the mist nets that are used, um, to catch the birds is really living up to its name.

So if we go talk to him, he'll ha- definitely have more information on it.

And where is he?

He's at my favorite place in the whole world, Creswell Crags.

Let's do it.