LUP to Bronze Age

Meet the Ancestors at Prehistoric Belton is the most recent article on this topic, produced in September 2024. It will take you up close and personal with the peoples who have littered the Park with their flint over millennia!

Compared to outside of the Park, Belton is teeming with human, knapped flint. The earliest flint found dates to the re-population of Britain after the last ice age - around 14,000 years ago, the Late Upper Palaeolithic (LUP). Others date from Mesolithic (or 'Middle Stone Age') 11,600 to 6,000 Before Present (BP) and continue to the Bronze Age 5,300 to 2,700 BP. Most of the flint in the park has been found from examining molehills or rabbit excavations. A few have been found during archaeological digs in the deer sanctuary. These rare finds reflect how little the Park has changed. They also point to the importance of the River Witham in sustaining our 'Stone Age' ancestors. Daryl Garton a lithics archaeologist has validated the flints found during this millenium.


Creswell Cags, Robin Hood Cave horse. One surface of the bone carries a carefully engraved drawing of the forequarters, head and neck of a galloping horse shown facing right. Red ochr rubbed in. Dating to ~12,500 years ago.

A carousel of some of the flint finds

Flint knapping produces a mass of flint debris - what is usually found, but may include discernible tools either dropped or discarded. All are prehistoric, but some are dateable, like Mesolithic microliths that were mounted on projectiles like harpoons. Scrapers were employed to remove fat from the inside of hides. The burnt flakes could be used to heat water. Some pieces still have cortex on them the outer surface of a flint nodule, and so produced early in the knapping. Some flints show hard knapping with a hammerstone, other soft knapping with antler. Belton hosted deer long before 1690. Some have a characteristic colour positing a source in the Lincolnshire Wolds.

Astonishingly, the Belton flints demonstrate the reuse of the same areas within the Park, close to water, across several thousands of years. Once brought to the surface by molehill activity, either the flint is reburied by bioturbation, or mechanically crushed by vehicles or mowers - as illustrated by one flint in the carousel or collected for archaeology!

To the left is the key to the finds illustrated on the Google My Maps below. The 1990s collection in purple were located only to an area, whereas those of this millennium are georeferenced using mobile phone GPS, accurate to 20 m. The '?' are flints with no location information. Stream modelling using 1 m digital terrain model LiDAR shows actual or posited streams. 

Zoom in and out and click on the icons for photographs and more information.

Alternatively download a kml file with the locations and images. You will need Google Earth Pro installed on a PC or laptop.

In 2008, four test pits were dug in Spring Meadow between the Witham and the car park visible immediately south west of the oval in the image above. None of them showed any archaeology let alone flints. Geophysics indicates that this area was medieval ridge and furrow. Excavation in that area in 2010 was again unrevealing. The geological strata were interpreted as alluvial from flooding or standing water. Trenching for electric cabling in 2011 , parallel to the Witham and north of the Mansion, again showed no flints. The principle clustering to the southwest of the Park seems a genuine phenomenon.

Flooding Belton

The image left, shows the georeferenced flints mapped in red. The rivers are in blue with the Witham valley flooded using 2020 Lidar elevations. The flint would have been dropped in the main on dry land. Its distribution on higher ground indicates that the river was much broader 1,000s of years ago. The site of Belton House and garden would be a swampy river basin, explaining the lack of any recorded flint in that vicinity.

The last ice age

the Devensian, led to Belton (red dot left) becoming a tundral landscape of permafrost encompassed by a 1 km thick horseshoe of ice at the glacial maximum 22,000 BP. No humans lived here for 15,000 years. The Condover, Shropshire mammoths died 12,800 BP. But the ice sheets had retreated sufficiently for humans to return from continental Europe via Doggerland by 14,700 BP (Gough's Cave).  Locally, the first humans returned about 13,000 BP in pursuit of ungulates, horse and deer. We know this from the Late Upper Palaeolithic flints to be found at Creswell Crags and at the open air site at Farndon near Newark. The latter area is visible from Bellmount. 

From 12,900 to 11,700 years BP there was a sudden return to glacial conditions when humans fled to warmer climes. They migrated back with warming during the Mesolithic which is when the Belton flints begin. Flint clustering of all ages relate mainly to the Witham, but also to a stream that opens up across Bellmount Avenue in rainy weather.

Rate at which the ice sheet over the British Isles during the last Ice Age melted. The ice free land was tundral.

Wittering 25 miles south of Belton exhibits striking ground patterning, crop marks, caused by permafrost expansion of cracks in the bedrock. Recent research has shown extensive ice-wedge cracking in the east Midlands landscape from previous ice ages including the Devensian1 (tinyurl.com/groundpatterning downloads a KMZ file for Google earth). This permafrost landscape demands persistently frozen ground for at least 2 years, making the terrain inhospitable for hunter gatherers.

Why did hunter gatherers come to Belton?

Four reasons

2. Climate warming led to an increasing European population necessitating a search for new hunting grounds for food.

3. In the absence of metal technology, flint was essential for hunting and then processing meat and hides. The latter were used for clothing and shelters. The Lincolnshire Wolds and the flint bearing chalk of Norfolk were a natural attraction for raw materials. Flint found at Farndon is chemically traceable to these sites.

4. Ungulates would over winter on Doggerland and migrate westwards to higher ground in the Spring for fresh grazing for parturition then return in the Autumn. Rivers formed a natural trap for the animals as with Farndon on the River Trent, then a braided river. A parallel is the mule deer of Wyoming that can migrate 150 miles or more in each direction for the above reasons. Native American Indians intercepted them using flint technology.

Inundation of Doggerland 8,200 BP left it a as a scattered archipelago of islands, eventually to sink below the North Sea.

Modelling water flow within the Park using digital terrain LiDAR 2019. The flints cluster around the Witham and ancillary streams. Extensive 'modern' disturbance around the Mansion and in the garden will have led to loss of flints. Areas to the west of the Witham and west of the Park wall have not undergone molehill archaeology.

How Belton might have appeared between 11,600 to 6,000 BP. Based on research at the Mesolithic settlement of Star Carr. Pine and birch dominated. Replaced over time by lime, elm, oak and hazel covering 90% of the land. Mesolithic sites are not uncommon in the east Midlands.

Rainwater soaks into the Lincolnshire limestone and is discharged as springs feeding into rivers. Larger animals like deer and horse prefer open water like the Witham and its tributaries. Wild horses need 8 to 10 gallons of water per day and feed on grass. Hence, the trees close by the Witham would be burnt down to promote grazing ground for entrapment. The horses would look like that in the header image. The forward pointing mane is similar to Equus ferus or Equus przewalskii. 

Star Carr fish consumption was dominated by carp and minnow as is found today in the Witham. This why Belton was the ideal hunting ground for our ancestors.

Overflow from wild boreholes in the Fenlands east of Bourne led to the Romans constructing Car Dyke for drainage.

Another recently excavated Mesolithic site near Scarborough throws further light on how our forebears used the landscape for survival.

1. Baker C., Garton D. and Ross I. N. (2021) Widespread pre-Devensian and Devensian peri-glacial patterned Ground in the East Midlands revealed in summer 2018 satellite imagery. Mercian Geology Volume 20 Part 2 November 2021 pages 102 to 119.