THE first Ice Age cave art to be found in Britain was unveiled yesterday, more than 12,000 years after it was carved into the rock face of a limestone gorge.

Discovered three months ago at Creswell Crags, in Nottinghamshire, the representations of a large ibex (a type of mountain goat), a bison, a horse and birds are the most northerly in the world and are being hailed as a find of international significance.

Paul Bahn, Britain’s leading Ice Age art specialist, yesterday described the discovery as the fulfilment of a lifetime’s dream and Nigel Mills, the manager of the caves complex, said that it was “like waking up one morning to discover the Mona Lisa hanging on the back wall of your garage”.

The animals, whose curved lines were created with a sharp flint tool, are unlikely go on public display for several years and may never become widely accessible unless millions of pounds can be found to upgrade facilities at the site, a few miles east of the M1 on the northern edge of the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border.

Further art exploration and research, funded by English Heritage, will now be carried out in the complex of more than 20 caves at Creswell Crags, a Scheduled Ancient Monument, which was first visited by Ice Age hunters more than 40,000 years ago.

The spectacular magnesium limestone gorge, one third of a mile long, 65ft high and 250ft wide, was explored by the Victorians, who carried out an extensive excavation of the caves, about 150ft deep, in the 1870s and removed cart-loads of stone tools and bones.

Dr Bahn, who has been studying Ice Age art for 30 years, said that his initial reaction when he first saw the 2ft-long ibex high on the wall of Church Hole Cave had been one of disbelief. “It has always been a dream of mine to find cave art in Britain,” he said.

“It’s there in France, Spain and Italy and we knew there’d been human occupation at this time in Britain, but it had always been believed that there was no cave art to be found. Now we’ve hit the jackpot and they’ll have to rewrite the text books.”

Dr Bahn made the find on April 14 with Paul Pettit, a palaeolithic archaeologist from Oxford University, and Sergio Ripoll, an international expert on cave art. The engravings would have been difficult to spot even under ideal lighting conditions, but the task was made even harder because graffiti from the 1940s and 1950s — the caves were not closed to the public until the 1970s — had been scrawled on the rock face containing the ibex. Once the shape of the animal has been outlined, however, the picture becomes clear.

Also on show yesterday were engravings of a smaller ibex, part of a horse, a bison and a collection of four long-necked birds, possibly swans.

Their creators were hunter gatherers who lived in a relatively cold climate when Britain still had a land link to northern Europe and who may have travelled to Germany and France.

Dr Pettit said: “The discovery of this cave art, which is so similar to art found in France and Spain, gives us a highly important link to the Continent and puts to an end any doubts as to whether there was a significant degree of cultural contact.”

Graffiti in the caves includes such work as “PM 1940” and “J Gascoigne 1870”. It was also revealed yesterday that someone must have scrambled up the side of Church Hole Cave, perhaps in the 1940s or 1950s, found the mountain goat and used a stone to add a beard.

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