Pits and Pingos
Most of this walk takes place in the southern half of the forest, where Santon Downham and High Lodge are located. But there are some amazing sights to see in the northern half, too.
Firstly, Grime’s Graves: not graves at all but a massive Neolithic flint mine. Here you’ll find around 430 pits and craters pock-marking a patch of open heathland. Using picks made from deer antlers, our ancestors burrowed deep into the ground, through layers of sand and chalk, to reach the flint that lay (and still lies) some 50ft below the surface. Later, when the Anglo-Saxons found the pits, they thought they might be graves dug by ‘Grim’, a variant of the Norse god Odin. Now an English Heritage site, the graves are a great way to see what the Brecks looked like before the forest came.
Then there’s the Great Eastern Pingo Trail, near the village of Thompson. Here we’re going back even deeper into history; specifically, the last few ice ages. A pingo is a large circular hill which is pushed up when a ‘lens’ of frozen water forms beneath the surface and then expands. During the last few ice ages, this area was covered with them. But around 10,000 years ago, the climate warmed enough to melt the underlying ice. The pingo-hills collapsed, leaving only pools of water that were once the ice-lens.
On the Pingo Trail between Thompson, Stow Bedon and Great Hockham, there are about 80 of these pingo pools, ranging in size from delicate little ponds to tennis court-sized meres. It’s the highest concentration of pingos in Britain – all thanks to that dry, sandy soil, the flat terrain and the clement climate.