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The Pin Hole Cave was the first of the five caves forming the Creswell Group, in which excavation work was undertaken by the Rev. Magens Mello in 1875, and where his first discoveries were made. Operations at that time were confined to a limited area at the entrance of the cave and were mainly superficial; subsequent excavations ignored the cave entirely, and consequently the important deposits contained there have remained intact. This is a fortunate circumstance, because the Pin Hole, by reason of its position in the cliff face, is the only cave of the group in which a stratified record of the whole sequence of Creswell cultures has been preserved. Had it been excavated in 1875 much important scientific evidence would inevitably have been missed which the systematic excavation of the cave by modern methods has revealed, thereby providing not only valuable information respecting climatic variations during the cave period, but also a type cave-section for Britain.Two beds of cave-earth are present—an upper, red, cave-earth, 6 to 7 feet in thickness, sealed beneath either crystalline stalagmite or breccia; and a lower, yellow, cave-earth, 10 to 11 feet in thickness, the total average depth of the deposit being 17 feet to the bed rock of the cave. The upper cave-earth contains a series of typical Upper Palæolithic industries ranging from Upper Aurignacian and proto-Solutrean at its base, to a late Aurignacian culture at the top, corresponding in time to the Magdalenian of France.

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The extensive prehistoric flint mining site of Grime's Graves occupïes high ground near the Southern boundary of Norfolk, at a maximum of 100 feet above O.D. It is set amidst wild undulating breck land, here and there densely clothed in bracken, the extensive belts separated by spaces of close cropped turf, or brown heath, conspicuously sprinkled with white patinated flints, a prodigious number of which are flakes of human production.Many of the hill-tops are crowned by plantations of hardwood and coniferous trees, but there is no evidence that this lonely land of wide expanses was ever more than thinly covered by native timber and one feels that the country as seen to-day is much as the ancient flint miners knew it, thousands of years ago.Though now so lonely and isolated, for neither high road nor dwelling exists within a mile radius, it was obviously once the centre of great activity, for the total mined area is not less than 34 acres in extent.Of this, 16½ acres are occupied by 366 cup-shaped hollows, varying from 12 to 70 feet in diameter, all plainly visible on the surface and each denoting an ancient mine shaft. Over the remaining 17½ acres there are no surface indications to suggest the presence of underlying shafts, but excavations during the last four years have definitely established their existence and proved the area to be closely crowded with mine shafts of small diameter.

The discovery of Floor 85, in 1920, with its definite three period stratification, for the first time demonstrated what some people had long suspected, viz., that the Grimes' Graves industry was not confined to any one period exclusively, but was the outcome of a practically continuous local development from an early stage in the pre-historic period down to the end of Neolithic times, and the exploration of this Floor established three important facts:—(1) That an early industry had existed on the site characterised by the practice of naturalistic engraving on flint crust and the production of flint implements of certain distinctive types from mined flint of the variety known as Floor-stone.(2) That that industry was the earliest so far recognised at Grimes' Graves and was clearly not contemporary with any of the 366 visible mine shafts on the site, but ante-dated them so considerably that the implements of the lowest level, F.85c, had become patinated and buried beneath accumulations of humus, etc., before mining operations commenced at that place.