Digging Deeper Project Launched at Kents Cavern

Kents Cavern awarded HLF funding for Digging Deeper. A project to promote education, outreach and conservation at the cavern.

The Kents Cavern Foundation (KCF) has been awarded just over £26,000 by the National Lottery for its latest project, Digging Deeper. 

Digging Deeper will create a variety of innovative educational resources aimed at understanding how our ancient ancestors lived during the Stone Age. Kents Cavern is internationally important and the KCF is the charity responsible for cave conservation, education and archaeological investigations at once of the UNESCO Global Geopark’s most important Geosites.
The project will explain the geological processes that formed the caves, the nomadic routes that ancient humans took across land-bridges to reach Kents Cavern, how they lived off the land, how they adapted to climate change and the dating science used to establish over 500,000 years of human occupation at the site. 
The funding has been made possible by National Lottery players through the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
James Hull, a trustee of the Kents Cavern Foundation, said: “This support from the National Lottery is invaluable as it gives us the ability to better share and protect the heritage values of this remarkable prehistoric site.” 

Elliot Ling, Education Officer at Kents Cavern and project lead said: “The project opens up a new range of opportunities to make the Stone Age more accessible to people of all ages and abilities. Digging Deeper will give school children a far better learning experience at Kents Cavern. We will develop more themes for participants at the Stone Age School Saturday Club and in partnership with Living Options in Exeter, we will make the cave more accessible to visitors with disabilities, initially focusing on guided tours for people with hearing impairments. 
“We will work closely with the partners of the English Riviera UNESCO Global Geopark on this project and one of the exciting outcomes will be better interpretation on the geological heritage of the area and the development of an information film on how climate change has affected this part of Devon over the last 150,000 years”.
Nerys Watts, Head of HLF South West, said: “Kents Cavern is an incredibly important part of our prehistoric history and National Lottery funding is set to make it even more exciting! From revealing stories of the Stone Age and climate change to making the site itself more accessible for everyone, we’re delighted to support these exciting plans for Devon’s heritage.”