Bytham River

The Bytham River was one of the great Pleistocene rivers of central and eastern England until it was destroyed by the advancing ice sheets of the Anglian Glaciation around 450,000 years ago. The river is named after Castle Bytham in Lincolnshire, where the watercourse crossed the Lincolnshire limestone hills in a valley now buried by Anglian till. West of that location, its catchment area included much of Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire. East of that location, the Bytham flowed across what is now the Fen Basin to Shouldham, then southward to Mildenhall, then eastward across East Anglia. It met the Proto-Thames in a delta near what is now the Norfolk/Suffolk border and flowed into the North Sea. Britain was then joined to the Continent by a land bridge and the Bytham joined the North Sea somewhere beyond the northern end of that land bridge. Chris Stringer writes: "As the Bytham River slowed past Warren Hill [in Norfolk] towards its delta on what is now the East Anglian coast, it deposited sediments on the edge of the huge north-facing bay, into which the Rhine also flowed. The sites of Norton Subcourse in Norfolk and nearby Pakefield, just over the border in Suffolk, were probably both related to the Bytham, and they record a time when the climate of Britain was balmy and Mediterranean, and this part of East Anglia was a fertile estuarine plain." The Anglian ice advance which followed, with its ice front reaching at least as far south as London and Birmingham, overrode all or most of the Bytham's catchment area. The course of the river was severed in the region of the Fen Basin. Following the ice retreat, the Bytham's remaining western section became part of the Trent catchment, and its remaining eastern section became a precursor of the Waveney river, running across East Anglia. Numerous quartz rich gravel deposits, and carboniferous chert which originate from the midlands of England have formed the basis for plotting the river's course. In the mid-2010s the existence of the Bytham was disputed. It was argued that an eastern section of the supposed river, flowing across central East Anglia, was indeed part of a pre-Anglian watercourse, but one whic

Flows through: United Kingdom.

River data from Wikidata (CC0); lengths normalised to a common unit.