5:09pm Wednesday 20th October 2004
It might get a bit chilly in Finchley this winter, but nowhere near as much as it did 10,000 years ago.
As revealed in Alan Titchmarsh's riveting The British Isles: A Natural History last week, Finchley felt the full brunt of the Ice Age and is still, incredibly, showing signs of its frosty history now.
It was shown how stones in East Finchley's Coldfall Woods (off Creighton Avenue) date from the period when it was covered in a huge ice sheet, and also how the now piddlingly small Mutton Brook - which runs from East Finchley to Edgware - was a vast river in a time when grunting neanderthals populated the area.
And any neanderthals living to the west of the current site of Finchley Road Tube station would have been spared the major traumas of the Ice Age. The enormous ice sheet that covered most of Europe came to a halt at this very site. According to our calculations, East Finchley, North Finchley, Friern Barnet, East Barnet, Southgate and Cockfosters would have been under ice, making them very cool places for vacationing neanderthals to go sledging or throw snowballs.
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