XXVII.—Lake-dwellings in Holderness, Yorks., discovered by Thos. Boynton, Esq., F.S.A., 1880–1

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Abstract
The Holderness district is a vast accumulation of the great Northern Drift, a thick deposit of clay and gravel, with scratched and striated boulders of Scandinavian and other rocks marked by the grinding and drifting of glaciers and icebergs. This Northern Drift rested on the ancient surface of the chalk when that surface sloped from the Wolds, 600 ft. high, to 60 ft. and more below the sea-level. The vast bay that formerly extended from Flamborough Head to Spurn Point thus received the ice-sheets of the Glacial period, which in melting deposited debris frozen into their mass. There was thus formed an irregular crescentic area, 40 miles long and 20 miles in maximum breadth, reaching the foot of the Wolds which was then the seashore with creeks running inland. The tract rarely rises more than 30 ft. above the sea; and the natural drainage, on account of the slope of the drift, is from the seashore towards the centre line of the drift area. The surface drainage from the Wolds also tends to the same line of outflow. In ancient times the outlets of this drainage into the sea would have been higher, as the strata rise seaward; and consequently more water would have been penned up in the prehistoric lakes, and a larger proportion of the area flooded, than would now be possible, since the waste of land by the sea, at the rate of nearly two yards a year, has been going on for many centuries.

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