Crowning high ground just to the north of Worthing, Cissbury Ring is the second-largest Iron Age hillfort in England. Its monumental earthworks, built c.300 BC, enclose an area of 26ha – but the site is also home to traces of much earlier activity. The ground within and around the ramparts is pockmarked with grassy mounds and overgrown craters testifying to the efforts of Neolithic flint-miners, working some 6,000 years ago. Before the advent of metal-working, flint was one of the go-to materials for tool-making – it was durable and hard, but capable of being shaped into a variety of forms – and the chalky environment of the South Downs was a rich source of this glossy black stone.
Cissbury Ring would have been a hive of such activity: over the course of around 500 years, some 270 mineshafts were opened on the hilltop. Although now mostly infilled, these pits originally descended metres into the ground – a remarkable achievement given that they were dug using only stone tools and implements crafted from red-deer antler and bone – and from their bases radiated honeycombs of ‘galleries’, tunnels following the flint seams horizontally underground. Although the shafts were not all in operation at the same time, they highlight the scale and longevity of the industry that the site witnessed.
The mines have attracted archaeological attention for centuries, but the most-illuminating excavations were those carried out by John Pull in the 1950s. For Pull, a local, self-taught archaeologist, Cissbury Ring marked the culmination of a decades-long career investigating other Neolithic flint-mines in the area, and his findings would revolutionise understanding of such sites.
