A brush with nature Richard Mabey

摘要

"Virtually the Ice Age," proclaims the brochure for Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge cut into the unspectacular farming country of north Nottinghamshire. The prehistoric image is hard to sustain. The river that helped carve out the valley is now an ornamental lake. A busy tourist road runs between the caves where hyena bones and quartzite spearheads have been unearthed. Yet it was here, in 2003, that archaeologists discovered the first British Palaeolithic rock art, a series of bas-relief animal carvings that are reckoned to be the most remarkable of their kind in Europe. I'd called in on the off-chance, and found the caves locked up -a safety measure that is probably merited, for once, given the clutter of raw limestone rock inside. But peering through the grille outside Church Hole, I fancied I could see a bird carved on the ceiling, an arching neck ending in a great beak. It looked a lot like an ibis, and the thought that this image, of a creature I knew, had been shaped by human hands 12,000 years ago gave me goose flesh.