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It is a mining village but it has beauty at its doorstep. It has given its name to Creswell Crags, a tiny ravine of richly wooded Magnesian-limestone rocks rising each side of the road towards Sherwood Forest.
One side of the Crags is in Derbyshire, the other in Nottinghamshire. In their sides are the famous caves where remarkable implements and works of art made by the earliest men in Britain have been found. These caves have names of their own - Robin Hood's Cave, Church Hole (named from its narrow tapering entrance), Mother Grundy's Parlour, and the Pin Hole.
Over 100 years ago Sir William Boyd Dawkins began to dig in these caves, and among many treasures he found the earliest example of pictorial art discovered in our land, a piece of smooth bone three inches long and an inch deep, on which had been scratched the head and shoulders of a horse. The mane of the horse is remarkable, as the hair stands up straight; drooping manes were seldom shown in drawings by the cave men.
Inch by inch the soil from these caves was removed and sifted, down to the white sand and red sand were bones with one or two rude implements of quartzite which were also found in a layer of red clay above. The remarkable thing about these bones is that they belonged to the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros, animals which needed a far warmer climate than ours. Hyenas shared the cave with them, the marks of their teeth being on the larger bones. The hippopotamus is a survivor of the Pliocene into the early Pleistocene age, and the man who made these quartzite implements before the ice age descended on the land must have had a hot meal from the flesh of these beasts, for signs of fire remain on the bones. Above the clay we come to the mottled and light-coloured cave earth with implements in a higher stage of manufacture.
On a higher layer still is a red cave earth in which charcoal fragments and blocks of limestone occur with the bones,with implements made of flint brought from a distance. The Pin Hole Cave proved the richest of all, and from it we have evidence that at least two glacial periods have passed over Creswell Crags, driving men from it. Thousands of years separate the periods of its habitation. The remains extend over a depth of 15 feet, and one of the most thrilling finds was the bone of a mammoth which a cave man split to obtain the marrow and then threw aside. leaving his flint knife embedded in the joint.
Another amazing find was the egg-shell of some kind of goose. At its narrow end was a hole through which the cave man had sucked its contents. A rare find was a pendant of mammoth ivory, oval in shape and no thicker than a postcard. A round hole cleverely pierced at one end suggests that it was a charm worn by a lady of the caves. Here also was the skull of a huge bear as big as any at Whipsnade Zoo, and the strange thing was that all its teeth had been extracted, doubtless to make a necklace for the queen of the cave. But the gem of Pin Hole was an engraving of a masked man or woman on the bone of a reindeer. The figure is standing erect apparently engaged in a ceremonial dance.
Other engravings worked on ivory, and the beautiful flint tools with which they worked and hunted and fished several thousands of years before the birth of Christ were found in the upper part of this cave which has proved one of the most valuable records we have of the men of the Old Stone Age over a period of nearly 500 centuries. The caves continued to be occupied into the early Mesolithic period and, after a millennia of desertion,use was made of them again in Roman and even early English times.
Interestingly, most finds like this have been dated at several thousand years BC, much more recent than the theory of evolution originally proposed. But if you enter the visitor centre at the site, there are banners proclaiming that the finds are "millions of years old". The reason? The centre is partly funded by the local Education Authority whose curriculum stubbornly insists that they preach this theory, even though they know it's incorrect.
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