Arrowheads

[Lincs Yellowbelly]

Hi all,

I'd quite ike to find a flint arrowhead but have no idea on the best places to look can anybody help?

[artdemole]

Well' here's something to carry on with.Belchford area.Rich in finds.Juicetrump hill is another. Do a 'google' lincolnshire flint arrowheads-You will find loads of info there. Happy hunting....

[Lincs Yellowbelly]

Thanks, the area i'm planning to look is nearish to Belchford and has 2 Long Barrows in the area. How do you best find them? just by looking down when walking?

[artdemole]

Just look around any disturbed soil in the area.It's just a matter of a chance find.

[Farplace]

Its just a matter of luck. I found one in my garden, just lying on the surface after heavy rain.

[Lincs Yellowbelly]

Thank you, I look forward to giving it a go

[ChrisJB]

The uplands of the Pennines and the North York Moors has turned up hundreds down the years, although in twenty years of looking in the South Pennines I've only found one, after a moorland fire, when the peat had burned off. The barbed and tanged forms are Bronze Age, whilst the leaf shaped ones are earlier and from the Neolithic.
Even more common in the South Pennines are microliths (smaller flint tools), flint cores, blades and waste from them, which are even earlier still, dating from the Mesolithic. I have found plenty of these down the years.
Where I live in the South Pennines there has been a long tradition of dedicated 'flinters', beginning in the late 1870's, with great men like Law and Horsfall, H. Colley-March, Francis Buckley, Ammon Wrigley and more recently, Dr W.P B Stonehouse to name a few. Many of their wonderful collections grace local museums in Lancs and the West Riding and some of them published leaflets and books which make fascinating reads if you visit the local studies libraries. It was reading their works that first got me interested in 'flinting' on local moors whilst on my walks.
If you do venture on to the moors a searching, south fancing slopes tend to be best and where the peat has eroded away is a good place to start as the flints are almost always found in the greyer sub-soil beneath.
A good book with plenty of grid references for the Mesolithic find spots is 'The Gazetteer of Mesolithic sites in England and Wales', by J.J Wymer. Neolithic and Bronze Age stuff has turned up at many of the sites in it as well. It might be a difficult book to get hold of however.
An alternative approach is to buy a modern arrowhead. Search out a chap called John Lord who runs flint knapping courses and sells his own flint tools. He is extremely skilled and I'm sure he has a website.

Chris

[foxy mars]

I have a old edition of the Cleveland Way Guide by Alan Falconer and dated 1972. The section between Old Byland and Osmotherley (Drovers Road) seems to of had arrowheads and spears found around the early 1900's and these were noted on the maps in the guide.

Pygmy flint man would of been around these parts 6000-2000 B.C. with Bronze Age man around 2000-300 B.C.

That's the good thing about the Cleveland Way, it's packed full of stuff like that and Geology is excellent too.

Someone, said on another forum, that the Cleveland Way was boring compared to other walks like Coast to Coast. But, the background isn't.