The desecrated area of Flamborough Head lies between the village and the North Landing, and if we are deliberately unobservant between those points, we may be able to give the headland the appreciation it deserves, provided always that we do not go there in the popular time. Coming from the station, the first noticeable feature is at the point where the road, until a few months ago, made a sharp turn into a deep wooded hollow. It is here that we cross the line of the remarkable entrenchment known as the Danes’ Dyke. At this point it appears to follow the bed of a stream, but northwards, right across the promontory--that is, for two-thirds of its length--the huge trench is purely artificial. No doubt the _vallum_ on the seaward side has been worn down very considerably, and the _fosse_ would have been deeper, making in its youth, a barrier which must have given the dwellers on the headland a very complete security. Like most popular names, the association of the Danes with the digging of this enormous trench has been proved to be inaccurate, and it would have been less misleading and far more popular if the work had been attributed to the devil. In the autumn of 1879 General Pitt Rivers dug several trenches in the rampart just north of the point where the road from Bempton passes through the Dyke. The position was chosen in order that the excavations might be close to the small stream which runs inside the Dyke at this point, the likelihood of utensils or weapons being dropped close to the water-supply of the defenders being considered important. The results of the excavations proved conclusively that the people who dug the ditch and threw up the rampart were users of flint. The one piece of pottery discovered was pierced with a hole, and seemed to be the ear of a jar, and the worked flint implements included a perfectly formed leaf-shaped arrow-head, a flint formed into a small hatchet, and others chiefly coming under the head of scrapers. The most remarkable discovery was that the ground on the inner slope of the rampart, at a short distance below the surface, contained innumerable artificial flint flakes, all tying in a horizontal position, but none were found on the outer slope. From this fact General Pitt Rivers concluded that within the stockade running along the top of the _vallum_ the defenders were in the habit of chipping their weapons, the flakes falling on the inside. The great entrenchment of Flamborough is consequently the work of flint-using people, and ‘is not later than the Bronze Period.’ And the strangest fact concerning the promontory is the isolation of its inhabitants from the rest of the county, a traditional hatred for strangers having kept the fisher-folk of the peninsula aloof from outside influences. They have married among themselves for so long, that it is quite possible that their ancestral characteristics have been reproduced, with only a very slight intermixture of other stocks, for an exceptionally long period.