Chequer's Wood and Old Park

About

Chequer's Wood and Old Park is a 106.9-hectare (264-acre) biological and geological Site of Special Scientific Interest on the eastern outskirts of Canterbury in Kent. It is a Geological Conservation Review site. This site includes Fordwich Pit, which has yielded a large collection of early Acheulian handaxes collected in the 1920s when the pit was quarried for gravel.

The sediments at the site form part of the fluvial terraces of the River Stour. The context of the handaxes within the sediment sequence is poorly documented, but based on later excavation (which recovered additional lithic flakes but no handaxes) and luminescence dating of the sediments, the hand axes have been suggested to date from two periods of the Middle Pleistocene. A 2025 paper suggested that some of the hand axes date to 712,000 to 621,000 years ago (Marine Isotope Stages 17-16), while others date to the Anglian glaciation event (MIS 12, c.

437,000 years ago). This would make the earlier artefacts the oldest Acheulean handaxes in Britain and northern Europe, and the site the earliest excavatable archaeological site in Britain, as two earlier known occurrences - Happisburgh and Pakefield - are located in cliffs...