La Cotte de St Brelade

La Cotte de St Brelade is a granite ravine on the southwestern coast that Neanderthals used across roughly two hundred and fifty thousand years, and excavation there found stone tools in enormous numbers along with two heaps of mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones, stacked in a way that has been read as evidence of hunting drives over the cliff. Erosion threatens the deposits and the site is closed and monitored rather than open.

Background

In Jèrriais, Cotte means cave, and an older name for the place may have been La Grotte à la Fée, The Cave of the Fairies. Found in 1881, it has been dug in several phases from 1910 to the present. A granite headland here holds two deep ravines belonging to a collapsed sea cave system, which once held over 40m of deposits recording as many as 13 separate phases of Neanderthal presence. The record spans two warm interglacials and two long cold stages. The McBurney excavations alone yielded 74,397 stone artefacts. Digs in 1910 and 1911 found eleven human teeth, and in 1915 Ernest Daghorn recovered a human occipital in the West Ravine. The Société Jersiaise owns the site.

Source: Wikipedia, "La Cotte de St Brelade"

The main sights

• The ravine - the granite cleft in the cliff the site occupies.
• The occupation span - use running across roughly a quarter of a million years.
• The bone heaps - the stacked mammoth and rhinoceros remains found in excavation.
• The coastal setting - the site above what was dry plain during glacial periods.

When to go

Not applicable; the site is closed. It can be seen from the coast path above and from the sea. Material from it is displayed at the Jersey Museum.

Practical notes

The site is closed to the public and cannot be entered. What can be seen from outside is a cleft in a cliff. The finds are in the Jersey Museum, which is where to go for the substance.

Nearby

Beauport Beach is southeast, and St Brelade's Bay is east.

Key facts