lovely quote from a book by Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh about engraved drawings in a local chalk cave.
"These mysterious figures, made in England, cut in the bones of the local modest, scarcely palpable chalk hills, had survived many conquests, many convulsions, innumerable deaths and changes, had survived their own significance, so that nobody knew what they meant, and they were still here. Still a part of things. Whatever terrible fate awaits us, she told herself inwardly, we must not overestimate it. In another thousand years somebody will stand here, looking baffled, and roused as I am to an unfocused love of country by a few bumps and scratches on a subterranean wall. I wonder why they made this massive hole, with only stag bones and horns as shovels and picks?
What labour! Perhaps even then it was a shelter. She noticed that the sign on the door, worn nearly past legibility, had mentioned ‘ritual worship’. Ritual worship, she thought smiling to herself, was a translation of ‘The archaeologist hasn’t a clue what this was for.’
Sayers, Dorothy L.; Jill Paton Walsh. A Presumption of Death (Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane series) . Hodder & Stoughton. Kindle Edition.