Scene : Uxbridge

Uxbridge???

"Just over 9,000 years ago a group of a dozen people set up camp there and lit a fire. They needed the warmth as it was the depth of winter. The hunters sat in two arcs, on either side of the fire, side-on to the wind. Food was scarce in the forest, but they had with them a cache of red-deer bones from the legs of at least fifteen animals, probably collected over several weeks of hunting. The meat had previously been stripped from the carcasses, but the bones were kept so that the nutritious, protein-rich marrow was available at the toughest time of year, when hunter-gatherers frequently lost weight. As they sat on either side of the fire the little group split the bones to extract the marrow and threw the ends of the shafts behind them. It seems from the distribution of material that the members of the clan had their specialist jobs - wood, bone or leather working, with the flint-knappers at the ends of the arc to keep the sharp waste fragments away from the central area."

From David Miles, "The Tribes of Britain"

According to another Dramatic Reconstruction, there were five people camping out on the same spot 1,000 years before that.