Langar & Barnstone during the Stone Age
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Were people living in this area during the Stone Age?
NO and YES ! ?
Langar in the Ice Age
The map shows the British Isles during the last Ice Age →
115,000 - 11,000 years ago most of Ireland, all of Scotland, the North of England and Wales were covered with a deep layer of ice. In places it was 3000 metres thick. The temperature was always well below zero.
Langar is shown on the map - click it to enlarge it.
Even where ice is not shown on the map, the land was cold, bleak and lifeless. Nothing and no-one could survive here.
Above: From 115,000 to 11,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, the Vale of Belvoir looked like this. Underneath the covering of snow lay the huge icy Humber Lake which stretched for 200 miles from Yorkshire to London. (Of course, there was no there London then!)
Above: The Humber Lake with its icy waters are shown in blue.
(Click the maps to enlarge them.)
The map shows our area at the end of the last Ice Age - but there were no roads, towns or villages there then, of course. North of Nottingham the land was covered with a thick sheet of ice all the way to the North Pole. Where Langar is now was at the edge of the giant Humber Lake which is shown in blue.
The end of the Ice Age
11,000 years ago the ice started to melt - millions of gallons of freezing water poured into the Humber Lake, draining away along the Vale of Belvoir and the Trent valley into the River Humber and out into the North Sea.
↑ This is not Ice Age Langar but Patagonia in South America where the Perito Moreno glacier suddenly collapsed into Lake Argentino in March 2018. The end of the Ice Age in Nottinghamshire would have looked like this. Click the image to see the action.
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Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly plants began to grow again and gradually, gradually, gradually animals and people came back as the climate grew warmer.
Langar in the Stone Age
The Middle Stone Age - Hunter-gatherers
Thick forests grew across Britain as the climate grew warmer. Many animals moved back into the country after the ice melted and Stone Age people hunted them for food using traps, stone-tipped spears and bows and arrows. They used sharp flint stones to cut up the meat. The Stone Age people followed the herds of wild horses and red deer. Other species in Britain after the Ice Age included mammoth, elk, aurochs, wolf, arctic fox, arctic hare and brown bear.
The New Stone Age - the first farmers
At the beginning of New Stone Age 6000 years ago, Nottinghamshire was covered by a vast forest.
Lime trees were common, mixed with oak, elm and hazel trees. Along the river banks, birch, hazel, willow and alder trees were growing. It would be interesting to see if these same tree species still grow in our area 6000 years later!
There were also wide areas of grassland - New Stone Age people may have deliberately set fire to the forest to clear the land for farming.
Stone Age people in Langar
Langar Hall
In the late 1970s a team of archaeologists and volunteers carried out a survey of the Vale of Belvoir. They did not dig to find archaeological remains: they explored the area by field-walking - a line of people spread across a ploughed field looking for anything unusual.
These stone tools were found in the large 10-hectare field west of Langar Hall. This is how we know that there people were living here 6000 years ago.
Flint tools
The tools that were found are made of flint, a type stone found in the south of England which can be broken and shaped to make very sharp cutting edges.
The flint tools were found in the 10-hectare field west of Langar Hall in the north-west corner of the field beside the Stroom Dyke, 56 flints were found: some were arrow heads, some were spears, many of them were scrapers used for cleaning meat from animal skins. (Nos. 1 to 10 above).
It is not easy to give an exact date for the flints, but they are probably from the late New Stone Age (the Neolithic 6000 - 4500 years ago) or the early Bronze Age (4000 to 2750 years ago).
The archaeologists could only explore the fields that had been ploughed. Other fields were under pasture - fields of grass for cattle and other animals. However, it is likely that many more fields also have Stone Age tools buried in the soil.
There might be some in your garden!
Smite Hill Farm
More discoveries
Even more flint tools were found in fields around Smite Hill Farm.
Six fields were explored and 327 flints were collected. The large number of finds and the range of different types suggest that there was a village near Smite Hill Farm where the people made flint into tools such as scrapers, arrow heads or axes. These Stone Age people were the first villagers of Langar
It is thought that the Smite Hill tools also date from the late Neolithic to the early Bronze Age.
Much of this article is based on work done by local Langar historians, Nigel and Barbara Wood who have also found stone tools in the Langar area during walks around the parish.
New Stone Age houses
No evidence has been discovered of New Stone Age houses near Langar. However, the discovery of the New Stone Age flint tools shows that people lived somewhere nearby.
The houses in the picture below were built near Stonehenge by modern archaeologists based on evidence found at Durrington Walls in Wiltshire. ↓
Even older . . .
Archaeologists field-walking near Bingham recently found a tool dating from Neanderthal times. It is 40,000 years old.
So there were early humans living in the Vale of Belvoir even before the last Ice Age.
To find out more about stone tools,
click here to watch a modern-day work make a Stone Age flint arrow head on the BBC Teach website.
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