A wall carving discovered in a cave on the Gower peninsula in south Wales could be Britain’s oldest example of rock art
, according to the archaeologist who found it. Dr George Nash, a part-time academic at Bristol University, discovered the faint scratchings of a speared reindeer in September 2010 and believes they were carved by a hunter-gather in the Ice Age, more than 14,000 years ago. It is thought that the discovery of flint tools in the cave during the 1950s, which date to between 12,000 and 14,000 BC, could hold the key to the carving's true date – similar designs found at Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire have also been dated to the same period.
Somerset County Council has revealed that Somerset was the site of the UK's oldest open-air cemetery
, following recent investigations into two skulls found at a sand quarry in Greylake nature reserve near Middlezoy in 1928. Radiocarbon dating of the remains has shown them to be around 10,000 years old and indicates that by around 8300 BC, hunter-gatherers were burying their dead on what was once an island amid the Somerset Levels. Other remains from the Mesolithic period have been found inside caves, making this the only known open-air cemetery in the UK.
Photographs from the First World War have been used to discover the whereabouts of a German bomber plane that was shot down during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Engine parts of the Heinkel, which was shot down in August 1940, were found 1.5 metres beneath a garden in Somerset
after the site was identified using First World War photographs of the wreckage. Archaeologists believe that parts of the plane broke off as it was pulled out of the ground, and were then buried under a bungalow built in 1955. The garden’s owner Alan Jennings commented: “It's not everyday you get someone knock on the door and say there's a German bomber in your back garden.”
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