As you walk here you are retracing the steps of early inventors and hunters.

Mesolithic camps and hunting from a distance

In the Mesolithic era about 9,700 years ago, the climate began to warm after the last Ice Age.  The environment around Hengistbury Head changed from arctic tundra to open forests of pine, birch and hazel.

This change in environment necessitated a new approach to hunting, where people could ambush animals at longer distances from within woodland. To do this, they needed something more than a spear, the bow and arrow. It's invention revolutionised hunting and the principles of the technology have remained unchanged for thousands of years.

Mesolithic people at Hengistbury Head used the campsite here to make flint arrowheads and shaped hazel or birch with flint tools to make their bows. Gut from the hunted animals would have been used to string their bows, and a complex glue made from beeswax, pine resin and charcoal was used to fix flint arrowheads to their shafts and fletch arrows with feathers.

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