You wouldn’t know the Lion Pit was there. This overgrown gorge exists quietly, without the sensation its name implies, below a housing estate, by Lakeside shopping centre and within earshot of the M25, wedged on all sides as tightly as the newbuilds that line its cliffs. This is industrial West Thurrock, far south Essex, where the wild marshes that still thrive on the Blackwater Estuary, where I live in the north-east of the county, have long since disappeared.
As I arrive, a fox strolls up the road, urbanely cool. It darts over the edge and into the gorge. I follow it. Descend into the pit, and you’re down in deep time. Ice age time, to be precise, because this location has produced some of the most important archaeological finds of Britain’s Palaeolithic past.
