Ancient history for all to see

A lovely Autumn morning for a walk among the dunes of the Sands of Forvie. The land is now dominated by huge mobile dunes that are slowly moving North. However, if we could go back in time, to the stone-age, then we would see a very different landscape, one free of sand. This morning I came across evidence that men were living in this area in those distant times. Towards the southern tip of Forvie, the wind had blown away the sand right down to the ancient pebble beach, exposing groups of worked flints. Wonderful to think that once a man sat here knapping flint and that, thousands of years later the pile of waste that he left behind is still there for me to enjoy.

Flint was an important material in prehistoric Scotland, used for arrowheads, knives, scrapers and for axes. In Scotland flint is generally found only as small pebbles on coastal beaches. They are particularly common on the Aberdeenshire coast where they are derived from the Buchan Ridge Gravel, the remains of a fossil beach of flint cobbles formed several million years ago.