Grotte du Lazaret, Nice, France

In Oct 2021 I was on a cruise ship that docked at Nice, south of France. Luckily it was a small ship and we were able to dock in the port, rather than the cruise terminal which is much further away from town. I spotted a cave marked on my map which was very close to the port, so had a google and found it is an archaeological cave and worth a visit. 

Grotte du Lazaret Nice

An archaeological cave site of prehistoric human inhabitation, situated in the eastern suburbs of Nice, very close to the port. The entrance is off Boulevard Franck Pilatte, and the cave is in the hill below the arches. Excavations have revealed  human shelters dating back to the  Lower Palaeolithic, 186 k - 127 k ya. More than 20,000 fossilized faunal bone fragments have been found. 

Cranial fragments of a skull are believed to be from a 9 yr old, at 200,000 years old, this could be Homo heidelbergensis or a proto Neanderthal human. 

Excavations took place in the 1970s. Close to the cave mouth, Andueulean stone tools were found. as well as fragments of animal bones and what are thought to be two charcoal hearths. 

From the road, a path leads up to the reception and the path is lined with information boards on the archaeology, geology etc, with prehistoric animal shapes made out of metal. 

At the reception I had to show proof of covid vaccines or a negative test. Then up to the entrance - amazingly there is no charge. A walkway into the chamber is lined with information displays and replicas of cave deposits. 

The cave itself is one chamber and visitors go along a platform listening to the audio visual display. The visuals are good, with items such as tools and bones illustrated in a square of light on the walls or floors. At the end of the platform there is a longer light display, showing a river or the sea in the cave, then "holograms" of  human inhabitants and animals etc with cave paintings of animals shown on the walls. It was all very effective and different from anything else I've seen. 

This wall is a replica of the wall that still exists on the hill top and the cave is below (see last photo) -

Apparently the cave opened to visitors in 2017, and surprisingly is free. Behind the reception is a very small room showing different skulls and a model of a cave man.

The hill where the cave is located, with the arched wall above -

See a detailed page on Grotte du Lazaret here and also a Wikipedia article.

Underground London - Eltham ice well

 I'm slowly visiting different ice wells and ice houses in the Greater London area. This one near Eltham I saw the sign as I was passing on the bus, so stopped for a visit. It is actually by Mottingham station, and is located at the edge of The Tarn, which is an area of woodland and parkland. 

The ice house was for Eltham Lodge which isn't that close, but the Tarn was then part of Eltham's Great Park. It is now part of The Royal Blackheath Golf Club.

The ice well is located north of the lake, where the word "The" is on the above map. It was built between 1750 and 1760. Eltham Lodge was built in 1664. The ice was cut from the lake and placed in the well, which was brick lined. The entrance faces north to give it shelter from the sun. The whole construction would have been thickly insulated with a conical straw thatch covering. And it is located in a shady and damp part of the wood.

A section has been removed to allow visitors to look into the well. 

The tarn is now a  bird sanctuary -

Underground London - Marble Hill grotto

Marble Hill is a heritage house and park near East Twickenham in the London Borough of Richmond. The park extends down to the Thames. There is a manmade grotto in the park.

I walked upstream along the Thames from Richmond bridge, and entered the park from the river path.

The estate dates back to the 18th century. Building work on the house began in 1724 for the owner, Henrietta Howard, who later became Countess of Suffolk. The gardens were designed as pleasure grounds, with terraces, shrubberies and trees. Henrietta Howard was the mistress of King George II when he was Prince of Wales. The house is a Palladian villa. 

The existing subterranean grotto is some 100 m south of the mansion. A flight of steps leads west, down to the remains of the brick-built grotto. When I visited in March 2021, the house and gardens were undergoing extensive renovation, and the whole grotto site was fenced off. 

The grotto used to be enclosed within evergreen and deciduous shrubs. The shrubs have been completely cut back, but presumably will grow again -

The grotto is not normally open to the public, so I didn't miss too much, I could only view it from behind the fence.

Originally there were two grottoes made for the Countess of Suffolk. However the second one had gone by 1816 and its site is not known. The surviving grotto, which by 1816 was already 'forsaken and dilapidated', was excavated in 1983 and later renovated.

The grotto was lined with shells, corals and blue glass

Alexander Pope the poet helped design the gardens. His grotto is situated in the grounds of his house and gardens in Twickenham, just a short distance from Marble Hill.

On the north-west edge of the Marble Hill shrubberies, within the wooden fencing, is the brick-built icehouse (listed grade II). I will have to go back once all the renovations are finished. 

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See more on the Historic England site, where there is a drawing of the grotto surrounded by shrubs, as well as a lot of information on the house and grounds. This blog has more info and some good photos of the grotto surrounded by shrubs (2012). I don't know if there are plans to restore the shrubs or why they were removed in the first place. 

And English Heritage places to see.

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"June 2021, two subterranean grottos in Twickenham will be having synchronised open days on the same day. Grottos were the height of fashion in the early eighteenth century and Twickenham is home to two of the most spectacular examples. The Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust and English Heritage, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, are offering a rare chance to visit both Alexander Pope’s grotto in Cross Deep and Henrietta Howard’s grotto at Marble Hill in one day."

However when I tried to book one month before, tickets were already sold out.

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UPDATE FEB 2022

At the end of Feb 2022 I went back to Marble Hill to see if the grotto was open, but found an archaeological dig was in progress. The notice board says they are removing the soil to reveal Henrietta Howard’s lost grotto.

I don't think it will be open by the spring as the notice suggests!

This English Heritage page gives more info on the updates to the grotto work, Nov 2021 and some of the finds.

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 UPDATE 2024

I finally visited the grotto in October 2024

3 myo old human ancestor fossil sent to Oxford for study

 The Malaysian media recently produced a few reports on how Perak Man has "been given a face" by 3D scanning. The human skeleton is roughly 10-11,000 years old. See my blog.

Then on 2 March 2021, BBC had an interesting report "Human origins: 'Little Foot' fossil's big journey out of Africa". It describes how the the of "Little Foot", the most complete Australopithecine fossil ever recovered, was sent to Oxford, UK, 2 years ago, for high resolution X ray scanning.

It took some 20 years to excavate Little Foot's bones from the Sterkfontein Caves just outside Johannesburg. The bones are thought to be more around 3.6 million years old. 

So far just the skull has been scanned.

See BBC report. 

The bones were sent to the Diamond Light Source in Oxford. And coincidentally after the BBC report, Diamond had a virtual tour on 13 March. This was really interesting, lasting over 2 years and was very detailed and informative. They even mentioned they had worked on Little Foot. See the virtual tour page.

Colombian rock art

 At the end of November 2020 the international media was full of stories of some amazing rock art found in Colombia. The art had actually been found in 2019 but had been kept a secret until the release of UK's Channel 4 documentary, "Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon". It's a 3 part documentary presented by Ella Al-Shamahi and first shown on English TV on 5 December 2020. 

The second episode on 12 December features the rock art. Ella goes to Colombia and her local guide got permission from the Farc (a guerrilla movement) for her to enter the area.  She is shown the rock art by British archaeologist Mark Robinson. He spent 2 seasons working there 

The art is on walls of stunning cliffs that rise above the plains. The area has been off limits for decades due to the war between the Farc and the government.  Following the peace treaty Mark was one of the first archaeologists allowed back in to explore it. He and his team discovered 17 walls of ancient drawings, all completely unknown to science.

The first cliff wall shown is absolutely covered in red ochre drawings that are still amazingly bright.  There is a mix of geometfic patterns drawn interspersed with animals and even humans.  There are also handprints. 

The first people are thought to have reached the Americas 15,000 - 25,000 years ago, passing a land bridge that then joined Siberia to Alaska,  then over thousands of years travelled down the the narrow gap of Central America and into the Amazon. 

The paintings can't be carbon dated as there is no carbon in the ochre. Photo from the Guardian :

We are shown another wall. The walls are being 3d scanned so archaeologists can examine the art without having to go there. Mark estimates there could be more than 100,000 paintings on the rocks. Probably the greatest cache of ancient rock art in the Americas and it is undescribed to science.  This second wall the designs look simplier and possibly older. One animal drawn is a mastodon, a prehistoric relative of today's elephants.  Mastodons haven't been around for 12,000 years but the artists must have lived alongside them. Other extinct species show a giant sloth and an early horse that went extinct in the Americas around 13,000 years ago.  So the people lived in a mix of forest and open Savannah.

The rock art is located at Serranía de la Lindosa which is in central Colombia

See more in The Guardian 'Sistine Chapel of the ancients' rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest.

And SD Celar British Museum has a good article and photos on the rock art and colonisation and settlements of the Colombian Amazon.

Underground London - Kingsway tram subway

The Kingsway tram subway is an underground tunnel in London used from 1906 until 1952. 

The subway is a cut-and-cover  tunnel, Grade II Listed and the only one of its kind in England. The northern entrance is at the junction of Southampton Row and Theobalds Rd in Holborn. The tunnel extended to the Embankment on the north side of the Thames and emerged under Waterloo Bridge on the north side. 

The tunnel was only built for single deck trams. 

From Wikipedia, "The approach from the north near Southampton Row was a 170-foot (52 m) open cutting with a 1 in 10 (10%) gradient. The tracks passed through cast iron tubes underneath the Fleet sewer before rising slightly to enter Holborn tramway station. South from here the subway was built with a steel roof to Aldwych tramway station and, because it was not initially planned to run a public service south of here, the tracks leading towards the Strand were used as a depot with appropriate equipment and inspection pits."

There is no public access to the tunnel or the underground station. The northern entrance -

Today a part of the tunnel from Waterloo Bridge to Aldwych (i.e. northbound) is used as a one way vehicle tunnel known as the Strand Underpass. It was opened in 1964. The underpass is in a concrete box inside the old tramway. I've been past the southern entrance hundreds of times without knowing what it was!

This is the Aldwych exit -

The 521 single decker bus uses the underpass from Waterloo Bridge so I took this to see the underpass for myself. The tunnel had a few twists and turns. It was hard to take photos as the bus was moving fast and was quite bouncy. 

There is an interesting video on YouTube of the 521 going through the tunnel.

See more photos of the underground section on the londonist . And a good article with an account of a visit and photos on webarchive . Wikipedia "Kingsway tram subway".

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Underground London - Woodlands Park Ice House, Acton

Woodlands Park is a tiny park in Acton, west London. It was formerly part of the six acre private garden to "Woodlands", a Victorian house. The house was demolished in 1903. The house had an ice house in the grounds (below the red marker), it is located next to a pond -  

This is a typical ice house, being an underground brick lined chamber, sunk into a hill and shaded with trees. Ice was taken from the nearby pond. The ice was stacked in the chamber, the sides of which were lined with straw. The ice could last until summer. Any melt water was drained through a hole at the bottom. 

In 2006 the ice house was restored and the pond recreated. 

There is a lovely tree growing alongside the ice house -

The house is gated so I could only stick my camera through the grill -

Info plaque from Heritage Lottery fund -

The pond -

See more on Woodlands Park.

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