Bytham River

[1][2][3] Chris Stringer writes: "As the Bytham River slowed past Warren Hill [in Norfolk] towards its delta on what is now the East Anglian coast, it deposited sediments on the edge of the huge north-facing bay, into which the Rhine also flowed.

The sites of Norton Subcourse in Norfolk and nearby Pakefield, just over the border in Suffolk, were probably both related to the Bytham, and they record a time when the climate of Britain was balmy and Mediterranean, and this part of East Anglia was a fertile estuarine plain.

It was argued that an eastern section of the supposed river, flowing across central East Anglia, was indeed part of a pre-Anglian watercourse, but one which came from the north-west, through the Ancaster Gap in Lincolnshire.

It has further been suggested that a western section of the supposed "Bytham river" was part of a post-Anglian watercourse which flowed SW-NE from Warwickshire to the North Sea via The Wash. That "proto-Soar" river was also modified by glaciation, but in that case by the later Wolstonian ice advance.

[6][7] A later study asserted that the refutation of the existence of the Bytham is itself "contradicted by an abundance of evidence", and that sand and gravel deposits of the proto-Soar in Leicestershire could "only have been emplaced by a river flowing eastward across East Anglia" (ie, according to this study, by a large, pre-Anglian river, the Bytham).