Cissbury Ring is an 84.2-hectare (208-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest north of Worthing in West Sussex.

[1][2] It is owned by the National Trust[3] and is designated a Scheduled monument for its Neolithic flint mine and Iron Age hillfort.

[9] During World War II, Cissbury Ring was used as a camp for the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in preparation for the Normandy landings in 1944.

[13] In the early eleventh century in the reign of Æthelred the Unready, Cissbury was known as Sith(m)esteburh, which is taken to mean the 'last or the latest fort'.

Flint was the common material for making stone axes for felling timber and working wood during the neolithic period.

Cissbury was one of several important mining industries in the UK during the Neolithic and is thought to have been used into the Bronze Age, and later the Iron Age though flint mining probably stopped during the late neolithic, but there is some evidence of re-use of flint for tools during later times.

The axes were essential for forest clearance for farming in the Neolithic period, and found many other uses, such as wood working.

[14] Excavation of the mine shafts by John Pull in the 1950s uncovered the remains of a young woman who had been apparently killed in a tunnel collapse.

The miniature carved whale has since been identified as an 18th century gaming piece, and was probably thrown in by a local at night during the excavation of the mine shaft.

The remains of two other people, a man and a woman, were recovered from different shafts at Cissbury in the nineteenth century and it has been suggested that the exhausted mines had a secondary purpose for formal burial.

Alternatively, it may have been expedient to send women into the mines as they could squeeze into the narrow galleries and some archaeologists have suggested that flint extraction was a rite of passage for the more slightly built juvenile members of Neolithic societies.