Brandon

Brandon, a market town in the Stowmarket parliamentary division of Suffolk, England, on the Little Ouse or Brandon river, 86½ m. N.N.E. from London by the Ely-Norwich line of the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 2327. The church of St Peter is Early English with earlier portions; there is a free grammar school founded in 1646; and the town has some carrying trade by the Little Ouse in corn, coal and timber. Rabbit skins of fine texture are dressed and exported. Extensive deposits of flint are worked in the neighbourhood, and the work of the “flint-knappers” has had its counterpart here from the earliest eras of man. Close to Brandon, but in Norfolk across the river, at the village of Weeting, are the so-called Grimes’ Graves, which, long supposed to show the foundations of a British village, and probably so occupied, were proved by excavation to have been actually neolithic flint workings. The pits, though almost completely filled up (probably as they became exhausted), were sunk through the overlying chalk to the depth of 20 to 60 ft., and numbered 254 in all. Passages branched out from them, and among other remains picks of deer-horn were discovered, one actually bearing in the chalk which coated it the print of the workman’s hand.