Essex Rock & Mineral Society
Report of Field Trip to Hullbridge, Essex.
5th October 2003
[Leaders Bill George & Graham Ward]
Some thirteen members and friends, including Messrs. John Skinner and Ken Crowe of Southend Museum, walked northwards, at 1pm, from the Anchor Inn car park towards the River Crouch on a very bright and fresh autumn morning. We soon reached the river where the tide was rapidly ebbing.
We
turned westwards and ambled along the south bank of the river until we
were opposite the confluence of Fenn Creek and the Crouch. Here photocopies
were handed out and the main features of the site outlined.
Mr. William Henry Rand apparently first explored this site in the early 1900s. Later collectors included F.N. Haward, A. Wright, and the famous Essex prehistorian S.H. Warren. In the late 1970s Stephen Vincent and Bill George collected from the site and published a short account of it in their pamphlet entitled Some Mesolithic Sites along the Rivers Blackwater and Crouch, Essex which appeared in 1980. This aroused considerable interest in the site which culminated in the publication, by the Essex County Council in 1995, of Messrs. Wilkinson and Murphy’s Archaeology of the Essex Coast, Volume I: The Hullbridge Survey. This fascinating work, which dated many of the deposits and examined the environmental evidence from the Holocene deposits, greatly influenced the appearance of England’s Coastal Heritage: A survey for English Heritage and the RCHME in 1997.
Hullbridge
is an exceptionally important site. Firstly many fine sections of recent
alluvial deposits, resting on London Clay, are beautifully exposed and
are constantly being eroded. Secondly the deposits have been studied in
great detail and the results published. Accordingly it is possible to
apply this information to other sites. Thirdly a prehistoric land surface
with many mesolithic flints is widely exposed and may be seen in the sections.
Derek Jacobi, who works on the mesolithic period, is apparently going
to make Hullbridge a type-site for the mesolithic.
Members
of the party were soon slipping, slopping and sliding on the slope of
the south bank of the Crouch. Numerous waste flint flakes, blades, cores
etc. were collected. These are usually in pristine condition. Great care
must be taken to avoid getting stuck in the soft mud.
As
the tide ebbed the party walked along the gravel bed of the river eastwards,
to the confluence of the Crouch and Fenn Creek. Here the intrepid party
finally crossed the river and explored the north bank of the Crouch, to
the west of the Creek.
Here
in situ mesolithic flints were seen. A very prominent peat bed is exposed.
This has been dated to about 3,700 years before the present. Mesolithic
flints may be collected from the stiff clay immediately below this. The
river Crouch formerly flowed slightly further north of its present course
here. This is clearly demonstrated in Wilkinson and Murphy’s work (1995
pp. 65-66). Accordingly the section exposed on the north bank here and
the prehistoric floor are technically part of the earlier south bank of
the river.
The trip achieved its three objectives. Firstly to examine the excellent exposures, secondly to examine in situ mesolithic flints and finally to ford the Crouch. The party then retraced its steps, returned to the car park and left for home.
The leaders stopped at Mountnessing church, near Brentwood, on the way home. The beautiful medieval parish church of St Giles was examined. The exterior of the north and south walls contain much cemented ferruginous blocks of presumably local gravel, or ferricrete. The church guide, incidentally, refers to a glass cabinet in the south aisle in which “is a bone thought by many to be a whale bone but more probably a bone of a mammoth. Mammoths were once common in this area”. A cursory glance confirmed this to be a modern whale rib. A quick search of The Essex Naturalist Vol. 14 p. 168 (1907) at home, soon confirmed this identification. Miller Christy sent a photograph of the bone to the eminent palaeontologist and Curator of Fossils to the Geological Survey, E.T. Newton (1840-1930). He was of opinion that it had belonged to a whale, probably the rib of a sperm whale (Physeter) or to a roqual (Balaenoptera), perhaps brought as an offering from some whaling ship in the Thames.
Bill George
Here
area few of the flint flakes found by Bob & Sandra Blackburn. It would
be easy to dismiss these artifacts but there is no local source of flint
at this site. Which means that it was transported there by man and knapped
on site, hence all the shards. They are all sharp and show no signs of
rounding due to geological processes. These samples have been eroded from
the peat layer and picked from the nearby foreshore.
Size of flakes in this picture are between 4 - 6cm. (RC)
Pictures and specimens are courtesey of Bob & Sandra Blackburn