Britain's only Neolithic flint mine — over 400 shafts sunk into the Norfolk chalk to extract the finest flint for tools and weapons.
Grimes Graves is the only accessible Neolithic flint mine in Britain and one of the most important prehistoric industrial sites in northern Europe. Set in the Breckland heaths of Norfolk, it covers 90 acres and comprises over 400 shafts, the most prominent of which plunge up to 12 metres through the chalk to reach the layer of high-quality floorstone flint — a fine dark material prized for making the sharpest cutting tools. Galleries were then driven horizontally from the base of each shaft following the flint seam, creating an underground network of passages that miners worked by antler pick in near-total darkness.
Grimes Graves was mined intensively between about 2600 and 2300 BC, and its flint was distributed across eastern England and beyond. The name 'Grimes Graves' is Anglo-Saxon, meaning 'the Devil's holes' — medieval people seeing the pockmarked landscape assumed it was the work of supernatural forces. One of the early excavated shafts contained a remarkable deposit: a carved chalk female figure, chalk cups and other ritual objects set around a phallus of flint — possibly a fertility offering made by miners seeking good flint seams. One of the original shafts has been made accessible to visitors, providing a vivid experience of Neolithic underground mining.
The finest surviving Neolithic flint mining site in Britain, Grimes Graves provides irreplaceable evidence for Neolithic industrial organisation, underground technology and ritual practice.
Intensive flint mining. Over 400 shafts dug, each requiring the removal of approximately 1,000 tonnes of chalk. Galleries driven at the base of each shaft.
Reduced mining activity but continued use of the landscape. Some later Bronze Age shafts and pits cut the earlier workings.
The site known as 'Grimes Graves'. Shafts used for animal burials and agricultural purposes. First systematically excavated in the 1870s.
A ritual deposit of a chalk goddess figurine, chalk cups, and a phallus made of flint — possibly a miners' fertility offering
Antler picks (from red deer) used as mining tools, many still in the galleries where they were left 4,500 years ago
The skeletal remains of Neolithic miners preserved in collapsed shaft fills
Evidence for the organisation of mining gangs and the redistribution of flint across a wide area of eastern England
Rare Neolithic pottery and flint tool production waste from working areas around the shafts
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