In 1969 blasting at Westbury Quarry on the southern flank of the Mendip Hills, exposed a massive cave filled with well-preserved faunal remains. The site has been the object of intensive systematic examination and excavation, first by Michael Bishop, then of the University of Bristol, from 1972 to 1974, and subsequently by the Natural History Museum. Westbury constitutes the first cave fauna of its age in Britain. It fills a major gap in the British Middle Pleistocene faunal succession and probably belongs to a single but climatically variable interglacial that succeeded the type Cromerian.

Two major lithostratigraphical units are represented in the cave fill, the Siliceous Member, a complex of waterlain silts, sands and gravels with a comparatively sparse derived fauna, which is overlain by the Calcareous Member, a finely stratified sequence of cave earths and breccias, rich in vertebrate remains, principally those of mammalian carnivores and small mammals. At present a lit... [read more]