Explore Ancient Subterranean Chambers of Grime’s Graves

About 4500 years ago, during the construction of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, flint was extensively mined in Grime’s Graves in eastern England. The underground passages carved by prehistoric miners are full of mysteries. A new tourist route has just been opened.

[Photo: Pit 1, Grime’s Graves by Ian Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

From a bird’s-eye view, this area resembles the surface of the Moon or a carpet bombing site from World War II. Nothing could be further from the truth. These are traces of the miners’ activity, who, around 2500 BCE, with simple tools, dug deep shafts from which they extracted flint.

Grime’s Graves: A relic from the time of Stonehenge

The vast mine was established in present-day Norfolk at the same time as the monumental effort to construct the world’s most famous stone circle — Stonehenge.