Ben Nevis the summit only to find "fragments of earthen and glass ware, chicken bones, corks, and bits of paper". It was not until 1847 that Ben Nevis was confirmed by the Ordnance Survey as the highest mountain in Britain and Ireland, ahead of its rival Ben Macdhui. The summit observatory was built in the summer of 1883, and would remain in operation for 21 years. The first path to the summit was built at the same time as the observatory and was designed to allow ponies to carry up supplies, with a maximum gradient of one in five. The opening of
History of the British Isles known as the Old and Middle Stone Ages, were characterised by a hunter-gatherer economy and a reliance on stone tool technologies. The Lower Palaeolithic period in the British Isles saw the region's first known habitation by early hominids, specifically the extinct Homo heidelbergensis. One of the most prominent archaeological sites dating to this period is that of Boxgrove Quarry in West Sussex, southern England. By the Mesolithic, "Homo sapiens", or modern humans, were the only hominid species to still survive in the British Isles. British Isles were linked to continental Europe by a territory named Doggerland. In the British Isles,