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established themselves in Wales in the Neolithic, Bronze, and Pre-historic Iron Ages.

The Paleolithic men, who lived in the caves of Flint, Glamorgan, and Pembrokeshire, in the Pleistocene Age, are beyond the limits of our inquiry, because they vanished long before the pre-historic period, without leaving any mark in the succeeding The inhabitants of Wales in the Neolithic

races.

Age must first be considered.

II. THE GEOGRAPHY OF WALES IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE.

When the Neolithic hunters and herdsmen found their way into Wales, the whole land, up to a level of about 2000 ft. above the sea, with the exception of stretches of heather and grass in the woodlands, was clad in a dense forest of Scotch fir, oak, yew, birch, ash, and holly, varied by copses of hazel; and the marshes, flanking the alder-lined streams and rivers, made it difficult to traverse the valleys. Consequently, they first settled in the ranges of hills, such, for example, as those of Colwyn and Denbigh, and the higher grounds generally, throughout Wales, which are marked by their huts, camps, and tombs. Their first clearings were in the uplands, and the first tracks, that ultimately developed into roads, linking one settlement with another, were on the ridges, or the lines of least resistance, and avoided the marshes at the bottom of the valleys, which were practically impassable.

These forests extended seawards to a level of at least 60 ft. O.D. below the present coast line, being now represented by the submarine forest bed at various points from the mouth of the Dee, past Rhyl and Colwyn Bay and Anglesey. In Cardigan Bay it probably gave rise to the legends of the lost land of Wales, and in St. Bride's Bay it excited the wonder of Gerald De Barri.' It also extended along both 1 Itinerarium Cambria, I, 13.

Strahan, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. Lond., 1896.

sides of the Bristol Channel, being met with in the Barry Docks at a depth of 35 ft. below the present sea level, and on the shore at Porlock at 22 ft. below high water mark.' In both these places the forest

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is proved to be Neolithic by the discovery of imple

ments.

We may, therefore, represent the Neolithic geography of Wales as in Fig. 1, in which the Clwyd entered the 1 Dawkins Early Man in Britain, pp. 249-51.

sea about 9.5 miles to the north of Rhyl, and the Menai Straits were occupied by streams, flowing in their several valleys from the divide near Carnarvon to the north-east and south-west, the one cutting the shore line about four miles to the north of Llandudno, and the other debouching into Carnarvon Bay, about five miles from the existing coast west of Lland wrog. Carnarvon Bay was then land, as far west as a line sweeping southwards from Rhoscolyn in Anglesey to the headland of the Lleyn Peninsula. The Bay of Cardigan was occupied by a plain above which rose the craggy ridge of Sarn Badrig, as far as a line drawn to the south-east from St. Tudwall's Islands, to a point about four miles west of Aberystwyth. In the Bristol Channel the Severn passed into the estuary to the south of Barry Island, and flowed through a dense forest of yews, oaks, birches, and alders, that occupied the whole of the submerged area, stretching from Cardiff to the south as far as Porlock, the mouth of the Parrett, and the marshes of Bridgwater, Weston-superMare, and Clevedon.

We seek in vain for the record of the time when these Neolithic forest-clad lowlands were depressed beneath the waters of the sea. The submergence probably went on through the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and ended before the Roman Conquest, when the Menai Straits presented exactly the same diffi1 Distance of Neolithic from Present Coast-Line.

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culties to the invaders of Anglesey as they present now. Anglesey was then an island, and was conquered by Agricola in A.D. 78, by an unexpected attack delivered at low water across the shallows by the auxiliaries.1

1 Tacitus, Agricola XVIII, Church and Brodribb Minor Works of Tacitus. "With some picked men of the auxiliaries, dis

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encumbered of all baggage, who knew the shallows and had that national experience in swimming which enables the Britons to take care not only of themselves, but of their arms and horses, he (Agricola) delivered so unexpected an attack that the astonished enemy who were looking for a fleet, a naval armament, and an assault by sea, thought that to such assailants nothing could be formidable or invincible."

I am unable to agree with the conclusions of Mr. A. Ashton, in The Battle of the Land and Sea, chapters xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, as to the submergence having taken place since the Roman Conquest.

III. THE INCOMING OF THE SMALL IBERIC RACE IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE.

It was under conditions such as these that the earliest ancestors of the Welsh people made their way into Britain from the Continent, and ranged over the whole

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of the area of the British Isles. They may conveniently be studied for our purposes, from the discoveries made in the group of caves, clustering round a refuse heap at Perthi Chwareu (Fig. 2), a farm high up on the hills near Llandegla, in Denbighshire. In both refuse heap and caves there were remains of the same

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