IF you thought the British Camp on the Malvern Hills was old, then just wait until you’ve read this. Because long before the Ancient Britons put in planning permission for a hill fort about 3,000 years ago, a tribe of hunter-gatherers had wandered across the local landscape and left behind their version of a Swiss Army knife and some very, very old cooking items.

Following in their footsteps, but about 10,000 years later, Dr Gerry Ronan has uncovered this remarkable prehistoric hoard while walking the family dogs near his home at Suckley, which looks across a verdant valley to the familiar outline of the ancient monument.

Over the past couple of years, the business management expert from Swansea University has accumulated nearly 3,000 artefacts ranging from tiny pieces of flint to a Neolithic axe head.

As befits an analytical mind, they are all neatly filed and catalogued and take up racks and racks of drawers in the Ronan’s cosy, lowbeamed period house.

Maybe understandably, the rest of the household is less enthused, but tolerant.“The daughters tend to refer to it as ‘Daddy’s playing with his rocks again’,” said Gerry.

It all began one day when he was walking his pair of black Cocker spaniels alongside a newly ploughed field. He said: “I saw some flints had come to the surface and just out of interest picked a few up.

“I knew what they were because they were white and thin.

“Not long afterwards, the museum at Worcester held an open day, so I took them along to try and find out more.”

The flints were identified as coming from the Mesolithic period, which followed the melting of the ice and is generally considered to be between 9000BC and 4000BC. This was the hey-day of the free ranging hunter-gatherers and long before Mankind turned to farming and a more stationary lifestyle.

The flints were important enough to be reported to Tom Brindle and Angie Bolton, the area finds liasons officers of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which is run by the British Museum, and Gerry began his own research to discover more.

“My very amateur fieldwalking survey has recorded a considerable Mesolithic flint scatter and, to a much lesser extent, a number of Neolithic stone artefacts,” he explained. “It clearly shows there were people living around here up to 10,000 years ago and that’s pretty exciting really because I don’t think it’s been recorded before. I found three clearly identifiable clusters of about 40 yards diameter within a quarter-of-a-mile radius of each other, each yielding about the same quantity of flint. Two of the sites are close to a stream in the lee of a valley with the third in a prominent and rather exposed location cresting a ridge. Altogether I have found nearly 3,000 pieces, of which about 15 per cent show signs of burning, suggesting the sites were domestic encampments. The range of these Mesolithic inhabitants is suggested by the fact that flint is not available within 70 miles of these sites.”

Gerry said the artefacts are, in the main, consistent with settlements in the mid to late Mesolithic, although cataloguing and identification are still ongoing.

“Of the Mesolithic material, blades and blade debris dominate the identifiable pieces,” he said.

“This would be indicative of a microlithic industry, but there are also considerable quantities of scrapers, borers, burins, denticulates and core material which one would associate with domestic activity.”

During his searches, a smaller quantity of Neolithic artefacts has also been recovered. These include two pressure-flaked bifacial tanged arrowheads, one with a single barb, a pot boiler (cooking stone), several scrapers and a polished igneous stone axehead.

“The last piece is rather crude,” he explained. “It still has many scars evident from its creation process, with surface polishing only where necessary for functionality.

Considering the continued reference to ‘barrow’ in the surrounding landscape, it is surprising that more evidence for Neolithic settlement did not emerge, but perhaps this has yet to be uncovered.”

Gerry has been known to bring back 200 pieces a time as he continues to locate, record, identify and catalogue the sites and the surrounding area. He expects that following harvest and ploughing, each of the three sites will yield up to 400 flint pieces a year for the foreseeable future if systematically fieldwalked.

Questions which have yet to be answered include establishing a more precise date for the encampments and whether or not they are linked. An opportunity perhaps for Tony Robinson and his Time Team to get digging.