A1-The Great North Road
Welton-le-Wold is a tiny hamlet nestling in a valley in the Chalk of the Lincolnshire Wolds, and Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, (AONB) just west of Louth. It's not on the A1 or any commonly recognized form of the Great North Road, nor even on Ermine Street, ten miles to the west. But somebody travelled here a very long time ago. And left behind a couple of Acheulean type flint hand axes and a flake tool. The tools were found by Chris Alabaster. A schoolboy at the time in 1969, he grew up to become a professional geologist and published the finds.
They were found in a newly exposed face in a quarry from which gravel was being extracted. The quarry opened in the 19th century but was vastly expanded during the second World War to provide aggregate for the runways of Lincolnshire's airfields. It had been one of the county's largest extraction operations but the quarry closed in the mid 1970s as the thickest deposits became worked out. The fluvial gravel lies under an overburden of glacial till and this was used as backfill after the gravel had been extracted. The quarry face now exposed is of these tills, the underlying gravel not being visible, but Chris Alabaster came here when the gravel was still being worked.
Geologists' encampment at Welton Quarry
The quarry is now an SSSI and a Regionally Important Geological and geomorphological Site (RIGS). Overlying, and therefore younger than the gravel that contained the tools, are three distinct tills. The lowest, the Welton Till, is a grey coloured chalky till with mostly locally derived fragments. There are some, possibly sub-glacial, varve deposits. Above this is the brown coloured Calcerthorpe Till. This contains erratics, some very large, of a variety of rock types from North Yorkshire, Northumberland and Scotland. The uppermost, Devensian Till, only occurs in the eastern part of the quarry. This seems to have been laid by ice moving southwards down the North Sea and then pushing westwards into the Wolds but reaching no further than the eastern end of the quarry. Again there are erratics from northern Britain but there has been no positive identification of Scandinavian material as has sometimes been supposed. It may be that northern ice was pushed westwards by Scandinavian ice in the North Sea area.
The significance of the site is that there are three distinct tills overlying gravel containing hominid artefacts and a warm climate fossil assemblage including straight tusked elephant. It is hoped that the gravels will soon (August 2003) be absolutely dated using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). Meanwhile it is thought that the gravels may have an age in excess of 400000 years, making them of similar age to the Swanscombe and Boxgrove hominid sites, far and away the oldest traces of man north of the Thames.
©Biff Vernon 2003