La Cotte point - St.Brelade

On a coastal walk today we were quite impressed by this precarious looking stack. If you look closely you will see a few rather hopeful looking tie bars, pinning the structure together. What you can't see is the concrete reinforcement applied to the base and several other areas of this cliff at St.Brelade.

We thought it was a bit much, trying to save such a wobbly geological lost cause as this, until we got back home and read up about the history of the cliffs on this peninsula. They are the site of the most productive Palaeolithic encampments in Northern Europe. The thick layers of sediments in the caves and crevices yielded over 200,000 stone tools and masses of bone fragments and massive bones from Mammoth and Wooly Rhino.

At various times in the last 250,000 years the caves in these cliffs have been used by Neanderthal tribes, mostly during ice ages, when this area would have been exposed and joined to France by the lower sea levels. During this time, this view would have looked out across grassy plains inhabited by migrating herds of large herbivores. The piles of large bones showed massive damage of the sort only sustainable by falling from a height, so it was surmised that the Neanderthals had herded some of these animals up to the clifftops and off the edge. A gruesome but effective way for these primitive peoples equipped only with basic stone tools to obtain the all important meat part of their diet.