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Welcome to the Swanscombe Heritage Park website

Swanscombe

Swanscombe is famous across the world for its spectacular finds of Early Man. Flint tools dating back 400,000 years to the early Stone Age - the Palaeolithic - litter the buried landscape under the current town.

Alongside the flint tools, are the remains of the animals which they had been used to kill, and then carve up.

Swanscombe is one of only two sites in Britain where actual human remains of this very early period have been found.

Incredibly, three different pieces of the same skull - the Swanscombe Skull - were found on separate occasions 1935, 1936 and 1955.

The Swanscombe Heritage Park, in the former Barnfield Pit quarry, is landscaped across the deposits that contained these finds.

An accessible trail winds through the site; information boards etched into giant granite blocks explain the sequence of deposits and stone pillars show where the skull fragments were found.

The site has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and also a National Nature Reserve (NNR). For more information about SSSI's and NNR's, please click here, where you will be redirected to Natural England's website and will find a vast array of information which will help you understand the importance of such sites and why they need to be protected.

Explore this site to discover the Stone Age beneath your feet; then visit us for real!

 

SwanscombeThe Swanscombe Skull

Swanscombe

Granite display board; the Swanscombe Skull find-spots

Website text by Francis Wenban-Smith,

Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins,
Dept of Archaeology,
University of Southampton