Page:The history of Little England beyond Wales and the non-Kymric colony settled in Pembrokeshire.pdf/31

Rh outlet into the ocean about 100 miles north-east of Cape Wrath; or wending their way eastward, entered a narrow gulf which then connected the Baltic with the open sea.

Having thus briefly described the outline of the land in pleistocene times, it will be well to examine in detail what relics of that distant period have been discovered in Pembrokeshire. These are almost invariably the products of caves in the carboniferous limestone. The ossiferous caves are situated in the south-eastern portion of the county, near Tenby. Hoyle’s Mouth was the first of them to which attention was drawn; then its ‘little’ neighbour in Longbury Bank was partially examined; the quarrymen on Caldy Island opened others; and lastly, the operations at Black Rock have disclosed a new series. Isolated bones have been found under the town of Tenby, and doubtless many sea caves, which are now scoured by the tide, were in pleistocene times wild beast dens, for mammoth bones are not infrequently met with on the shore. Last, though not least, comes the Coygan, near Laugharne; though as this cave is in Carmarthenshire, it scarcely falls within our limits. The Woogan, under Pembroke Castle, has not been hunted for pleistecene relics.

This is a tunnel cave, about a mile and three-quarters from the town of Tenby, and about a mile from the sea, though in recent times the tide must have run up to the foot of the rock from which it is excavated. The Hoyle is on the western side of a marsh known as the St. Florence valley, from which the sea has been excluded by sundry banks constructed at different periods; those which affect this portion of the valley are of unknown date, but as some ruined cottages just beyond the cave are known as "Old Quay," we may reasonably suppose that vessels ran up thus far, since English has been the language of the country. Some years ago, during the time of the late G. N. Smith, Recter of Gumfreston, a canoe, or "dug out," formed from a single tree, was discovered in the marsh near this spot. The cavern known as Hoyle's Mouth is in a limestone rock about 70 feet above the sea level. The entrance is wide and lofty, but it quickly contracts into a passage about 20 feet long. In this there are small chambers. The floors of these are covered with angular fragments of limestone, the passage itself being paved with stalagmite. What the Hoyle may have been in years gone by it is impossible te say, but in the present day it is of very little interest, for the stalagmite floor in most places rests either directly on the limestone rock without the intervention of cave earth, and therefore does not cover ossiferous remains, or only caps limestone cemented with a solid mass by carbonate of lime (breccia), from which bones or implements are difficult to abstract unbroken; while the broken limestone, although it contains both pleistocene and neolithic remains in considerable quantities, has been remorselessly tumbled over and over by generations of Tenby tourists, till its products are so mixed as to be of little value. I have myself found in the limestone, remains of hyæna (hyæna crocuta), brown bear (ursus arctos), reindeer (cervus tarandus), Irish elk (cervus megaceros), and boar; but whether this last was a pleistocene or a neolithic pig it is impossible to say. The same remark no doubt applies to the reindeer and Irish elk; but hyæna clearly proves the cave was inhabited by that beast in pleistocene times. Professor Boyd Dawkins adds to the list I have given, brown bear (ursus arctos), and man of the first stone age (homo palælithicus). With regard to the former, the bear