began to prevail in this country and the northward movement of the
reindeer brought the first Neolithic men into England, and it has been
suggested that some of these earlier tribes whose implements have been
discovered in White Park Bay, County Antrim and the MacArthur Cave, near
Oban, form a link between the Palæolithic and Neolithic people.

The culture of the New Stone Age was a huge advance upon that of the
earlier races, although it is more than probable that the higher
development existed in different parts of the world simultaneously with
the lower, the more primitive people becoming influenced by the more
advanced. A wave of great progress came with the Iberians of Spain who
spread across France and reached Britain by means of boats at a time when
it was probably once more an island.

Armed with bows and arrows and carefully finished stone axes and spears,
clothed in skins and wearing ornaments of curious coloured stones or
pieces of bone threaded on thin leathern cords, these Iberians or
Neolithic men gradually spread all over the British Islands. They
evidently liked the hills overlooking the fresh waters of Lake Pickering
for their remains have been found there in considerable quantities.

The hills on all sides of the Vale are studded with barrows from which
great quantities of burial urns and skeletons have been exhumed, and
wherever the land is under cultivation the plough exposes flint arrow and
spear-heads and stone axes.

Many of the numerous finds of this nature have disappeared in small
private collections and out of the many barrows that have been explored
only in a certain number of instances have any accurate records been
taken. It is thus a somewhat difficult task to discover how much or how