The cave older than almost anything else in Britain

Here's the Kents Cavern fact that puts everything else in this pack into perspective. This limestone cave system on the edge of Torquay holds some of the oldest human remains ever found anywhere in Britain, a jawbone fragment now dated to around 41,000 years old, from a time so distant it barely fits alongside anything else in this collection.

What makes the cave remarkable isn't just the age of one bone though. Layer upon layer of the cave floor recorded tens of thousands of years of continuous habitation, first by hyenas, bears and other Ice Age animals, and later by early humans, whose bones turned up alongside some of the earliest tools ever discovered in the country. It's a rare thing, a single site holding onto that much time in one place.

I painted Kents Cavern in watercolour and ink, that deep limestone dark. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Kents Cavern, Torquay · Travel Poster