Formerly, however, no such valleys existed, and a great dome of chalk, some 2,500 feet high at its crown, perhaps, though others would say less, covered the whole country.

That is why rivers like the Darenth and Medway cut clean through the North Downs and fall into the Thames, instead of flowing eastwards down the later valleys.

They started to carve their channels in the soft chalk in the days gone by, when the watershed went north and south down the slopes of the great dome.

And the red gravels with the eoliths in them, concludes Prestwich, must have come down the north slope whilst the dome was still intact; for they contain fragments of stone that hail from right across the present valleys.

But, if the eoliths are man-made, then man presumably killed game and cut it up on top of the Wealden dome, how many years ago one trembles to think.
* * * * * Let us next proceed to the subject of palaeoliths.