Jane Vavasor Durrel and the rural Oxfordshire of the 1810s

Jane Vavasor Durrel (1794-1871) was the granddaughter of an Oxford University Vice Chancellor and the daughter of the rector of Mongewell in Oxfordshire. The family, originally from Jersey and with longstanding - and even in her lifetime, strong - connections with the Channel Islands, had established offshoots in Oxfordshire, Wales and elsewhere by the end of the eighteenth century. Her father's long tenure of the living meant that Jane, like her sisters (who, like Jane, remained unmarried to their deaths), was closely acquainted with a rural community in Oxfordshire recovering from the Napoleonic Wars and facing the adjustment to postwar conditions in agricultural described by economic historians. Mongewell, like other rural parishes, remained essentially a stable population - few incomers, few people migrating any very great distance away. This settled order is reflected in the drawings Jane made in the late-1810s, which came into my hands from an antique dealer in London. The collection included drawing by other hands, including a sketch signed by William Crotch (1775-1847), musician and friend of J.B. Malchair. As an Oxford resident, Crotch would possibly have known the Durrels and (as often happened at the time) shared his drawings with the family. 

The small carton of drawings, papers, sermons and engravings form a collection documenting Jane's own interests - and the rural life of Oxfordshire people. The drawings are undated but almost all are on Whatman paper with a watermark for 1816. That the drawings might indeed be later is possible, but they are probably not much later, judging by the style of clothing and other evidence, than the mid-1820s. Here are a very few of them - many no more than sketches in the margin of drawings or on loose scraps of paper - as an introduction to Jane's world. They provide an insight into the daily life of an Oxfordshire parish and are offered without commentary.

Wagon entering a lane

Two people, one possibly an itinerant seller, the other off to market

Off to market

Gleaners (including two small children, probably girls)

Raft or punt fishing in Mongewell

Country Life and the 'Shakespeare portrait'

Country Life is the magazine we Brits buy primarily, I suspect, for the lavish illustrations of country house estates, and the advertisements for houses for sale of the type most of us could only afford with a major lottery win. (It is also, incidentally, still wedded to the idea of the society portrait of what - many years ago - would have been regarded as an 'eligible debutante'). As a magazine it is possibly as far away as one can get from a quintessentially modern journalism. Its stock in trade is the celebration of a country life style now enjoyed by fewer of us than ever, and celebration - rather than detailed examination - is the weekly diet of this glossy publication. It is not, certainly, a peer reviewed academic journal.

Why, then, the editor thought it wise to feature, prominently, the claims of one of its regular authors, botanist and historian of horticulture Mark Griffiths, that he has 'discovered' - by means of 'decoding' the images appearing on its title page - a portrait of Shakespeare on the title page of John Gerard's Herball (1598) is strange and bewildering. The 'portrait', Griffiths claims, is the figure standing on the right hand plinth labelled with what Griffiths says is not a printers device - as others maintain - but a cleverly encoded cipher for Shakespeare.

I don't want to add any more to the very obvious and extensive commentary on the doubts surrounding the iconography, or the character of the rebus on the plinth. A good summary of all of that can be found here , here and here , and enough commonsense let alone research suggests that the claims for a portrait from life on the title page of a book unconnected with Shakespeare himself or his world of the theatre and literature is unlikely to say the least.

What I do want to do is to add my 'two penn'orth' on the question of how the title page should be read -  that is,what all those figures are meant to be doing. My starting point is that a very similar, but not identical, title page can be found in Gaspard Bauhin's version of Matthioli's commentary on Dioscorides (also of 1598) produced in Frankfurt (below):

For those interested, you can see a more detailed version of the page at bit.ly/1Ai5sDS .

What's useful about this comparison is that Bauhin book is also, effectively a herbal; it also rehearses the contemporary elaborations of Dioscorides; and the title page has many of the same stylistic features as the Gerard book's title page (not least the garden portrayed in the bottom middle cartouche).

The Bauhin books shows a figure, to the left on a plinth, dressed in classical garb (Dioscorides); the other three key figures shown (on the right hand plinth and in the vignette scenes at the bottom of the page) are of different ages and are either all Matthioli or (possibly) the two at the bottom are he and the figure on the plinth is Bauhin. What is clear though is that the Bauhin title page is intended to mix Dioscorides with contemporary practitioners. 

So if - and its a big if - the representations in the Gerard title page are meant to be real figures one could read the Herball's front page as carrying images of Dioscorides (in painfully inaccurate garb) on the left plinth and all of the other figures as Gerard at three different periods of his life: in the 'Shakespeare' portrait as a military figure (we know he served in the army at an early part of his life) and in the figures above the plinth as older (top left) and older still (top right).

I should stress that I don't think this the most likely reading of the design of the title page of the Herball. The most likely is that, without the evidently greater skills of the engraver of the Bauhin book, Rogers - the engraver of the images throughout the Herball - was left to invent fantasy figures connected with the world of botany.

But it does suggest that it is possible to hold to an interpretation of the title page as a selection of real or imagined portraits of contemporaries or near contemporaries without any of them coming from a domain unconnected with horticulture and the medical uses of plants.

All about my office...

Model Farm House (built 1889) 

The Model Farm House at Church End, Hendon, is an example of late nineteenth century Queen Anne revival domestic architecture, and is sited at one of the most important and historic parts of Hendon. Together with the ‘Model Barn’1, it is a minor monument to Hendon’s agricultural past. Hendon was, until the nineteenth century, an agricultural community in which some 95% of farm and common land was used as pasture and meadow2. Soil here consists for the most part of green and brown clay intermixed with coarse or yellow sand and fine gravel allowing free drainage, in which well nourished and manured pasturage grass grows well. Winter stall feeding for milk cows was well established in southern England so that barn storage for hay was an essential part of any farm. The buildings clustered around the church and the Church Farm House at the top of Greyhound Hill seem, on the basis of archaeological and historical evidence, to have consisted mainly of such storage structures well before the present buildings were conceived in the late nineteenth century. The Hendon & District Archaeological Society ‘Church End Farm Building Record’3 notes, 

Surviving mapping and a water-colour by Thomas Bailey of c.1800, (identified as ‘Church End Farm’, and almost certainly providing a view of the north side of the farm yard), gives some useful clues to the later eighteenth century aspect of the farmstead. They indicate both the early presence of the barn still standing in 1961 and the limited number of other buildings then erected on the yard frontages, with perhaps only a single structure extending the northern yard range to the west by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Buildings immediately abutting the barn to the east, however, shown on the 1789 Rankin and Johnson estate plan (and still apparently in evidence on the 1863 OS) seem to confirm the existence of two cottages depicted in the water-colour, constructed with brick stacks, and with the larger of the two presenting a two storey sash windowed bay to the yard front.  

Late Georgian pictures of the top of Greyhound Hill show most of these stall feeding and storage barn structures to be lathe and plaster buildings in a poor state of repair. While few such structures would have been improved, they were probably repaired and patched well into the middle of the century. Hay, of course, was more than just for local feeding; selling hay to London city stables was an essential part of the Hendon farm economy during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. By the 1880s, then, the top of Greyhound Hill had several (probably dilapidated) structures and a largely undeveloped Church Farm House building with some smaller agricultural and residential buildings on the present site. When the architects Wimperis & Arber were engaged to produced the present buildings in 1889, the aim was not to produce simply an improvement in the current buildings but a whole remodelling of part of the site. 

Wimperis & Arber was a London architectural practice based at 25 Sackville Street, Piccadilly. John Thomas Wimperis (1829-1904) commenced practice in London before 1866. From the 1870s Wimperis was involved in the development of the Grosvenor estate in London and, in 1887, became one of the Grosvenor Estate's approved architects. In 1889 Wimperis took into partnership William Henry Arber, (b. 1847-1904), an assistant who had served articles with him from 18664. The partnership was formally dissolved in 18975 and Wimperis retired in 1898. Between 1889 and 1897, the partnership created some fine late Victorian buildings, such as ‘Chartfield’ on Putney Heath (1893), St Dunstan’s House (1893) and the Grafton Galleries in Bond Street (1892), all of which were startlingly novel realisations of revival ideas. The practice had gained some experience in, and reputation for, urban ‘agricultural’ architecture (as witness the Stables in North Audley Street, Westminster and the Stables at No 3 Lees Place, London) and, when engaged for the Church End site, used it to offer a solution that was at once practical, durable and elegant. Working in Queen Anne revival style6, with an unequivocal reference to contemporary arts and crafts detail in the building materials used, Wimperis & Arber produced a simple farm house echoing the main elements of Queen Anne revival ‘grammar’ in a small space – the irregularity of the ground floor design, the mock boarding of the upper floor (at Model Farm House, in terracotta exterior tiles), the half-timbering at the road-side gable end, for example, all find echo in larger more imposing revival domestic buildings of the 1880s.

1 More properly, the ‘long milking parlour’ as described in various late nineteenth century sources. Stall feeding and milking were, in parts of the east of England, occasionally combined in longer barn-like structures from the sixteenth century so that this is not out of keeping with vernacular tradition in the region. 

2 Daniel Lysons ('Hendon' in The Environs of London: Volume 3 County of Middlesex (Cadell and Davies: London, 1795), p. 1) says that in 1794 Hendon had ‘…8204 acres of land, of which about 300 were arable, about 120 woodland, the remainder pasture and meadow’. 

3 http://www.hadas.org.uk/projects/church-end-farm-building-record 

4 Antonia Brodie (ed.), Directory of British Architects 1834-1914: A-K Volume 1 of Directory of British Architects 1834-1914, (Continuum International Publishing Group: London, 2001), qv. ‘Wimperis, J.T.’. 

5 London Gazette, 24 December 1897, col. 7768. 

6 Donald Bassett has argued that ‘[b]y the 1880s the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair was being shared out between the 'Queen Anne' and Loire-chateau modes. French motifs were common to both. Men like J. T. Wimperis, Chatfield Clarke and Ernest George proved equally adept at the two styles, if two by then they still were.’(Donald Bassett, 'Queen Anne' and France’, Architectural History, Vol. 24 (1981), p. 90), but only a few details of Loire-chateau style (possibly the renaissance styling to the chimney-piece?) feature in the Model Farm House building itself, while the barn with the vernacular apse makes no continental stylistic references at all.

A very, very few words on 'sensemaking' and historical text-based data

Information scientists, and in particular those with an interest in visualisation, have generated a number of different approaches to recovering or discovering meaning in pooled experience data (including text data). Literally 'making sense of' a variety of stimuli (sounds, images, text, interactions, feelings, impressions, memories) is something we all do within our everyday lives. What computer and information scientists within two distinct but complementary traditions (human-computer interaction [HCI] on the one hand and information science on the other) have tried to do is to create model schemes for the effective construction of meaning from these data via software tools. Some of these tools create data taxonomies and representations of meaning, some create only the latter. All are trying, though, to automate the process of making sense of data - and in a world of significant 'big data' sources, this is a vitally important tool for users as diverse as security agencies, criminal investigators, librarians and, potentially, for historians too.

If 'sensemaking' sounds like an attempt to supplant the interpretative power of historical method, historians should rest assured it isn't. Sensemaking, when deployed effectively, is a means of revealing patterns, relations and clusters of meaning in data; it does not project onto those data anything other that the assumptions necessary to 'make sense'. It does not, for example, deduce significance. Moreover in the HCI tradition of sensemaking in particular [summarised in 1], it is essential that the 'point of view' which gives rise to the clustering is informed by expertise - and here the historian can find scope for working with the software engineer to develop tools, not merely deploy the ones developed. Sensemaking software development in this sense can be creative and involve, with historial data, considerable forensic and situational historical knowledge; one useful summary by one of the leading exponents of this approach [2] shows how software developers can, and indeed must, work with and transfer control to, domain specalists to make 'sensemaking' work .

One example of such a 'sensemaking' tool in the public domain is Invisque [3], a simple tool for visualising the 'sense made' of large collections of text data, resulting from a project funded by Jisc. As a video of the software in use shows [4], it is possible to use the HCI approach to sensemaking to 'make sense' of loosely categorised text data, or plain text sources. In an example given by Wong et al [3], a PhD student could use the sensemaking approach and the visualisation tools to shape a detailed literature search. Equally, however, the same student could make use of the technology to make sense of analogous corpuses of data - such as texts from the BL Incunabula Short Title Catalogue [5]. Other sensemaking tools, such as Stasko et al's Jigsaw [6] allows sensemaking among large corpuses of text documents where the finding and mapping of connections between data can help identify patterns in text records. Text, let it be remembered, is not the only material for sensemaking tools like Invisque. In my own university for example, where the software tool originated, we have been discussing potential applications within the extensive artefact and image collections of the university's Museum of Domestic Architecture (MODA) [7]. Yet greater potential exists in the ability of sensemaking tools to seek coherence among a disparate collection of sources (for example lyrics in Victorian popular songs, Victorian newspaper poetry, manuscript poetry in private archives).

The Invisque tool

There are methodological issues that will be of concern to the historian at the heart of this approach, of course, which will already have occurred to the patient scholar. In J.H. Hexter's terms the gestalt implied by sensemaking is very much more 'lumper' than 'splitter' in character [8, p. 242] - sensemaking allows one to frame connections in order to make sense of a whole corpus. 'Lumping' has consequences (ignoring 'blindspots' in the record, eliding meaning etc.). That, however, is more than made up for by the explanatory potential of (in particular, visualised) sensemaking to show in sharp relief just how clustered meaning might be framed even where the complexity of a text suggests layered or textured, or even hidden, meanings. Secondly it seeks meaning in data by inferring potential clustered association, but does not impute - only suggests - causation within it. If, for example, one were to frame a sensemaking analysis of single author texts such the The Entring Book of Roger Morrice (a very possible project given the scale of the text corpus and the sophistication of layered meanings within it), or multiple author documents such as selected texts from the Patrologia Latina, the historian would be left to hypothesize, weigh and assess causal theories behind the clustered meanings. Moreover one must be careful to recognise the generality of the claim made by sensemaking: it seeks to make 'senses' of data, not one - for example 'historians'-type - sense. Sensemaking techiques could be used to interrogate the texts of the Patrologia Latina for meaning in schemes not related to historical questions but to questions of an etymological kind.

What sensemaking may offer historians is a vehicle for investigating - 'trying out', if you will - meaningful clustering schemes in textual data. It will certainly do more, for digital text files, than might be accomplished by text analysis tools alone, which seek patterns in word representations, not intuitive 'sense'.

[1] Pirolli, Peter, and Daniel M. Russell. "Introduction to this special issue on sensemaking," Human–Computer Interaction 26.1-2, 2011, pp. 1-8.

[2] Youn-ah Kang and Stasko, J., "Examining the Use of a Visual Analytics System for Sensemaking Tasks: Case Studies with Domain Experts," Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.18, no.12, Dec. 2012, pp. 2869-78.

[3] Wong, BL William, et al. "Invisque: technology and methodologies for interactive information visualization and analytics in large library collections," Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011, pp. 227-235.

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDmswS6cceg (accessed 8th January 2015)

[5] http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/index.html (accessed 8th January 2015)

[6] Stasko, John, Carsten Görg, and Zhicheng Liu. "Jigsaw: supporting investigative analysis through interactive visualization," Information Visualization 7.2, 2008, pp. 118-132

[7] http://www.moda.mdx.ac.uk/home (accessed 8th January 2015)

[8] Hexter, J.H., On Historians: Reappraisals of the Masters of Modern History. Harvard University Press 1979.

Harry Burrard Farnall (1802-83)

Harry Burrard Farnall (1802-83) was an example of that extraordinary Victorian ideal, the gentleman civil servant defending the patrician notion of a generous, caring state in the absence of any very firm evidence that the state was routinely either of those things. What made me interested in him this week was picking up the picture below - an undated, unsigned, pencil drawing marked, in a small neat hand on card below the drawing itself, as 'Water Mill near Lyme Regis, H.B. Farnall'.

It's a tidily produced, finely drawn if clearly amateur evocation of the Dorset countryside. The cows, placidly grouped at the bottom right of the picture, are the least satisfactory element but there are some keen touches to the execution - notably the shadow on the front of the cottage, beneath the eaves overhanging the watermill itself and on the gateway leading to the cottage. Great care has been taken, but there is no vestige of real country life in the drawing. It is devoid of any life, and certainly of any human society.

The artist was the son of Captain Harry Farnall RN, himself the son of a 60th Regiment of Foot Lieutenant. The notion of service must have been absorbed at the dinner table, and the family motto, 'Persevere', must have provided a stimulus to hard work. He was educated first in Bristol and then at Charterhouse, where contemporaries would have included the Secretary of State for War during the Crimean campaign (Maule-Ramsey) and the Chief Justice of New South Wales (Stephen). At Cambridge he attended the then very new Downing College from 1825, having come from Brasenose College Oxford at which he had matriculated in 1820 - but, in an age of almost notorious academical laxness, probably doing very little more than was required to remain in residence and keep terms before his departure for Cambridge. As a Fellow-Commoner in Downing he would have enjoyed the benefits of a status considerably above that of the pensioners and sizars at the common tables in hall, but some way still below that of the sons of the aristocracy - comfortable and richly provided for certainly, but with a sense of a long way to travel yet to achieve absolute distinction. A good marriage helped. In 1829, almost three years after graduating, he married Dorothea, the daughter of Alan Bellingham of Bellingham Castle, Louth and thus married into a rich and established family which was returning MPs to Westminster both before and after the Great Reform Act. 

His career as a civil servant was not without incident, and most notably included (in 1866 while acting as the Metropolitan Inspector of Poor Laws, a post he held for some years) a critical reception from liberal critics and the press alike for his apparent blindness to the conditions in workhouse infirmaries. On the other hand, he along with Florence Nightingale had instituted, voluntarily, the first enquiries into nursing quality in workhouse hospitals the previous year. Occasional blemishes in an otherwise clearly dutiful if not occasionally prejudiced career included his inability of tell truth from fiction in the notorious Bethnal Green Workhouse case of the devious Theobald Meyrick, the master of what was perhaps the most appalling of the Victorian workhouses in London at the time. Meyrick seems to have got away with a light inspection by Farnall - and eventually it was the Board of Guardians, and not the Inspector, who brought Meyrick to book, a man so clearly guilty of a litany of crimes against inmates as to make a mockery of the idea that those in public service were at all obliged to offer compassion and care. 

My drawing, bought in a fit of enthusiasm for the inevitable puzzle (who was the artist?) seems most likely to be the product of some time before the Bethnal Green scandal, and a sign of a more retired and bucolic nature. Farnall moved to Dorset but continued to live in Kent and London too (wealth had its advantages). He was able to play the role of Deputy Lieutenant for the County and be Mayor of Lyme Regis, so the eye that saw and the hand that drew the watermill were not unfamiliar with the environs of the town. 

Finally what impresses one about this very minor amateur drawing is the artfulness of it. Constructed so as to leave no hint of the reality of country life (watermills were hard, noisy, places to live and work in and a miller's life was tough throughout the year) it displays a conventional regard for the landscape as a part of the settled order of Victorian England. Perhaps, ultimately, a public servant brought up and trained in the way that had shaped Farnall would not have thought otherwise about the rural world.   

Mud and a love of the past: turning kids onto history with a shovel

How do you encourage your children to engage with the past? In a sense, it has never been easier: television, books, DVDs, radio have all probably never been so alive with history – even if, sometimes, it seems all rather flippant, sensational and (sadly) inaccurate, and social media breaks up the continuity and focus an understanding of the past deserves. Enthusiasm, though, is catching, and it’s easy for children to find a love of history creeping up on them. 

My way to cement that in my son was, perversely, to dig. I have not one shred of archaeological know-how (I’m a died-in-the-wool historian turned economic historian turned economist), but archaeology has this great advantage over history from books if your young – you get to dig big holes, get mucky, and find treasure. Such is the power of archaeology to create a sense of wonder about the past, the extraordinarily open and welcoming dig at the Roman settlement at Silchester, under the watchful eye of Professor Michael Fulford has become an occasional joy for the family (see http://www.reading.ac.uk/silchester for details) because the Reading archaelogists allow everyone, from the very youngest, to get involved.

My house in Wokingham, though, is no Roman villa and our corner of the town is not as remarkable as Insula IX at Silchester. Ours is a large, Tardis-like, semi detached Victorian villa (built in 1895) on a plot of land that had once been an orchard, probably a brickfield for local building and only latterly used as land for houses. Even the road on which it was built is a new road, built after 1856. Many of the houses to the south of our house were built in the 1860s. Even relatively small scale maps provide good evidence of how the road grew. In 1816 (Figure 1) Gypsy Lane and Cockpit Path met where they do now, but there was no sign of the road springing from their intersection which now runs past the house. The area indeed, seems, to have been common land. By 1856 (Figure 2) the space between Cockpit Path and the current path to Sale Cottages was enclosed and by 1872, with the road now built (Figure 3), the same piece of ground is shown to have trees, probably an orchard (indeed at least one contemporary newspaper source specifically mentions apple trees on the house abutting ours). The enclosed land was still there in 1883 (Figure 4) but by 1898 (by which time our house had been built) the rest of the area was in-filled with houses.

Figure 1: Langborough Road area in 1816

Figure 2: Langborough Road area in 1856

Figure 3: Langborough Road area in 1872

Figure 4: Langborough Road area in 1883

Figure 5: Langborough Road area in 1898

I started, then, trying to get my son to see the pattern in the evidence. There seemed to have been three distinct phases of development on the land on which our house is built which, in stark terms, works as follows:


• Phase 1: Up to some point between 1816 and 1856, the land was unenclosed common land

• Phase 2: From at the latest 1856 until at least 1883, the land was enclosed and had trees

• Phase 3: From 1897, the land had houses on it.


But map work, and the slow exploration of the landscape a la Marc Bloch is all well and good if you’re an adult: it’s torture if you really can’t wait to get dirty and cut into the soil, so we decided to put in two exploratory pits - first a test pit located 2.5m from the northern boundary of the garden and 70cm from the eastern edge of the garden (the test pit measured 40cm by 40 cm approximately) and then a trench located 1.5m from the northern edge of the boundary of the garden and 5m from the western boundary. The trench measured 1.47m x 59 cm.

Figure 6: Image of rear of our house (copyright Google)

Doing as best as I could to imitate – if in a rather ham-fisted way – the method of real archaeologists (my touchstone here is Time Team, and reading occasional archaeological reports in awe at the inventiveness of field archaeologist) we beavered away looking for evidence. The test pit yielded fewer pieces of evidence than the trench, but probably as much per square metre overall. We found the following in the test pit:

• At 30cm depth, several pieces of loose, broken and charred brick which may be evidence of a previous building or, because they are so misshapen, possibly evidence of brickmaking on the site.

• At 42-44cm, a few small pieces of domestic blue and white Victorian china

• At 52cm, the soil changed to a light clay and produced some flint.


In the trench we found more evidence of how the land was used. I'd like to say we put the trench where we did because it ran parallel with what would have been a wall or boundary; it was therefore likely to have more evidence than a trench in the centre of the garden. In truth it was the result less of precise deduction or cool induction than of hope. We found, 


• At about 34cm depth, larger pieces of brick, but also large pieces of agricultural tiling and garden terracotta pots;

• At 41 cm, some very small pieces of domestic Victorian pottery. We also found a piece of silver from a wallet, dated 1902/3 and made by Thomas De La Rue & Co. from the evidence of the silvermarks on the piece of silver itself.

The silver corner from the de la Rue wallet

The de la Rue wallet (or rather one very like it)

• At 44 cm, more Victorian blue china, a thick piece of glass from the bottom of a wine glass (probably a mid-Victorian rummer, years rummaging in antique shops told me) and some thinner glass from a wine glass

• At 48 cm, smaller pieces of Victorian china, and a small fragment of a brown beer bottle.

A very few of the 'finds'

Here comes the difficult bit. The mud and soil lies all around you: your son or daughter wants to keep digging. Now, though, the historian in you wants to draw...conclusions. Sharp intake of breath, and hope he follows. We thought our finds were consistent with the following sequence of events for the space occupied by the back garden of our house:


During Phase 1: When the land was unenclosed, the pottery and glassware at deeper than 41cm in both points suggested that the open land carried some rubbish.

During Phases 2 and 3: Between 1856 and 1897, bricks and agricultural tiling seem to suggest that it was used for brick-making and/or agriculture.

During Phase 3: The piece of silver from Thomas De La Rue and Co. (dated 1902/3) suggests no more than that someone (we know from Census data probably who) was working in the garden and lost the edge of what would have been a very expensive wallet at that time. This suggests that the owner was at least digging down to 41cm, so some our finds might have moved in the soil in the trench. (I suggested that his wife would have been furious that he lost the silver flange from the wallet).


All in all, then, the evidence broadly confirmed the sequence of building suggested by the historical record - which might, in all fairness, be a disappointingly mundane conclusion to reach when you are young. But a ‘finds table’ stacked with 'evidence', mounds of earth, grubby clothes and fingers, and a sense of discovery make up for much even when the 'archaeology' isn’t, frankly, that much more illuminating than maps, newspaper data, photographs and house directory evidence would have been.


Give it a go: charm your kids with a walk into the garden and into the past, this weekend - shovels at the ready...