Swanscombe

Swanscombe /ˈswɒnzkəm/ is a village in the Borough of Dartford in Kent, England, and the civil parish of Swanscombe and Greenhithe. It is 4.4 miles west of Gravesend and 4.8 miles east of Dartford. Bone fragments and tools, representing the earliest humans known to have lived in England, have been found from 1935 onwards at the Barnfield Pit about outside the village. This site is now the Swanscombe Heritage Park. Swanscombe Man (now thought to be female) was a late homo erectus or an early Archaic homo sapiens. According to the Natural History Museum, however, the remains are those of a 400,000-year-old early Neanderthal woman. The c. 400,000-year-old skull fragments are kept at the Natural History Museum in London with a replica on display at the Dartford Museum. Lower levels of the Barnfield Pit yielded evidence of an even earlier, more primitive, human, dubbed Clactonian Man. Nearby digs on land for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link revealed a c. 400,000-year-old site with human tools and the remains of a Straight-tusked Elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), and evidence of water vole, pine vole, newts, frogs etc., indicating a site with standing water similar to a swamp. During archaeological work undertaken at Ebbsfleet, before construction of High Speed 1, an Anglo-Saxon mill and a Roman villa were found near Swanscombe. From Crayford to the Isle of Thanet the Danes occupied the land and terrorised the Saxon inhabitants, giving rise to the appearance of Deneholes, of which many have survived to this day. These were wells, cut deep into the chalk landscape, thought to be for concealing people and goods. They have a simple vertical shaft with short tunnels bearing horizontally from the base. The Vikings settled throughout the winter along the Thames estuary with their ships and established camps in Kent and Essex. In surveying the distribution of the many deneholes along the Thames corridor it would appear that Essex, on the northern shore of the Thames, sustained a greater influx of Vikings than did Kent, there being considerably more recorded deneholes in Essex, particularly around Orsett and Grays – see Hangman's Wood.