Monument record 0751900000 - Locke's pit, Hartwell

Edwin Hollis’ 1914 account of the discovery of Pleistocene animal bones at Hartwell, notes that Locke’s brick pit was dug into ‘the well-known Hartwell Clay’, but that the clay was overlain by ‘about five feet of Pleistocene deposit’; the latter being ‘… composed largely of local Portlandian material … here and there towards the base of the Pleistocene deposit are shallow bands of gravel and in these the mammalian bones are found.. ‘. He reported discovery of ‘Mammoth (Elephas primigenius), Woolly Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros antiquitatis), Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius), Aurochs (Bos primigenius), ?Bison (Bison bonasius), Cave-bear (Ursus speloeus) and Spotted Hyaena (Hyaena crocuta).’ ‘All the bones are much broken, and therefore difficult to identify with certainty, and although no doubt water-borne to their present position, they cannot have travelled far, as the fractures show no sign of wear, and in two cases where more than one piece of the same bone have been found the edges fit perfectly. Mr A H Cocks has suggested to me that the way in which two of the bones are broken suggest that it was done by man for the purpose of extracting marrow.’
In 1957, fragments of a hippopotamus incisor from the same pit which had been donated to BCM by Mr S G Payne many years earlier were also accessioned. Previously, fragments of a rhinoceros tooth and a bone from a Bos primigenius, from the Hartwell pit that had been donated by Mr Sawyer, had been accessioned in 1921, although their date of discovery is not recorded. In addition, amongst a large collection of fossils and other items accumulated by Z D Hunt, that apparently entered the Bucks Archaeological Society’s collection in 1876, were ‘c.12 fragments of bone a [sic] teeth of hippopotamus’ described as from ‘Pleistocene river gravels, Hartwell’, which are very probably from the same source. This gives a total of four separate finders and all of the discoveries seem to have been recovered between the 1870s and early 1920s.
Locke’s Pit attracted the interest of geologists from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, not on account of the discovery of Pleistocene bones but as a good source of Kimmeridge clay fossil. The first time the presence of riverine deposits was noted was by Professor Morris in 1873. [History of Locke’s Pit](B1).