When looking at Guildford’s Wikipedia page, the first thing that comes up under the History section is: “The earliest evidence of human activity in the Guildford area is from St Catherine’s Hill, where Mesolithic flint tools have been found.” After having read the source for this piece of information, I was interested in the discovery made in an area so local. 

If you’ve ever walked or ran up St Catherine’s Hill, you probably know the medieval chapel ruins. But the hill hides a much older secret: tiny flint tools left by people who lived there long before the Romans – even before the invention of farming.

In the 1950s, a collector named Robert Grace picked up almost 3,400 pieces of worked flint from the hill’s surface. In 1976, archaeologist G. Gabel published a report calling it an “extreme rarity” – a complete Mesolithic tool collection on Surrey’s Greensand.

Among the finds are 38 microliths (tiny blades used as arrow and spear tips), scrapers for cleaning animal hides, awls, pointed instruments for piercing small holes in leather and wood, and hundreds of waste flakes and cores. The presence of so many waste pieces proves people were making tools right there on the hill – not just using them.

The Mesolithic period (roughly 8000-4000 BC) was a time when Britain had just become an island. Small bands of hunter‑gatherers moved through dense woodland, hunting red deer, wild pig and huge wild cattle. They didn’t live in permanent villages, but they returned to St Catherine’s Hill again and again, attracted by the sandy soil, the River Wey, and a good flint for knapping.

Most of these Middle Stone Age sites in Surrey have only a handful of tools. St Catherine’s Hill had nearly 3,400 – a “complete assemblage” that lets archaeologists understand exactly what people used and discarded there.

Today one of the scrapers is in the British Museum. And the Wikipedia entry for Guildford now cites this discovery as the earliest human activity in the area.

So next time you look or go up at St Catherine’s Hill, remember: Guildford’s history didn’t start with the castle, the cathedral, or our school, but with a few hunter-gatherers’ sharp stones thousands of years ago.