The experiments on which these notes were made were undertaken to clear up a little of the mystery which has been thrown around the subject by well-meaning but not always chemically-minded people. Much has been said lately on the necessity for prehistorians being also geologists, but it is perhaps too much to ask that they shall, in addition, be chemists. But a very little knowledge of chemistry would have averted some of the blunders and misstatements met with on the patination problem. These notes contain no really original idea, but were made on experiments proving what to most chemists are well-known facts. The experiments were carried out in the brief intervals of routine work in a very busy laboratory, unfitted with any special re-agents or apparatus for the work.Silica is, chemically speaking, the dioxide of the element silicon, a body which does not appear to exist in a free state in nature, and which can only be brought into a free or elementary state by some what tedious laboratory processes.
My attention was first drawn to this locality in the summer of 1915. I exhibited the first few specimens obtained before this Society at the meeting held at Norwich on December 13th of that year, and a brief notice of the exhibit appeared in the Appendix to the “Proceedings,” Vol. II., p. 321.The site or sites (numbered for reference purposes LV.), are in the parish of Risby, two miles West of the village, on the Cavenham road, from which village they are only distant about one mile.The sites occupy the Northern bank and bottom of a small dry valley on Risby Poor's Heath. This little valley runs towards the (now) very small stream which crosses the main road at Roberts'-Bridge, which stream is itself a feeder of the Lark; hence the fall is from the Eastern boundary of the heath towards the West. The first site was indicated to me by numerous shallow, somewhat rectangular, excavations, apparently made, say, within the last thirty or forty years, presumably for the purpose of getting road-stone.
It is difficult to prove that a road is prehistoric—in many cases more difficult to prove that it is not—but the fourteen miles of the Norfolk “Drove,” “Droveway,” or “Harling Drove,” which connects the fenland at Blackdike, Hockwold, with Peddar's Way on Roudham Heath, have certain claims to: that distinction. Though not so well known as the Northumberland “Drove Way” or the Surrey “Drove. Road,” and probably a favourite route in mediæval times for flocks and herds to and from the fens, its origin must be sought in a much more remote period, and as for the greater part of its course its primitive condition is still retained, it is easy—possibly with the mental elimination of all trees from the landscape—to picture it as it was in its early days.
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