I began my Address last year with a reference to the changes in procedure at our Anniversary Meetings, and to their effect on your President. The process of change has continued, and the meeting which was formerly an afternoon function, and then was divided between the afternoon and the evening, is now for the first time held entirely in the evening, beginning at an hour which demands a real sacrifice from those of us whose dinner time cannot be varied with impunity. It is no longer only the President who suffers. But we shall doubtless agree to give the new time-table a fair trial before reconsidering this small matter of domestic policy.

In the house of Sir Edmund Lechmere, known as Severn End, near Hanley Castle, Worcestershire, there has been preserved for a long time past the interesting Saxon funereal stone, which, through the owner's kindness, I am permitted to make known to readers of the Antiquaries Journal. Many have seen and admired it, but it has not yet been published. Its history is unknown except in so far as its presence at Severn End goes back beyond any memories or records, and may run to centuries. So housed, it has escaped many of the ills that carved Saxon stones are heirs to, and, as the photographs on pl. XXVII will show, is in a singularly good state of preservation. One most important fact about it is its material, which is the local oolite, so much used in the neighbouring Saxon church of Deerhurst, with which it has some artistic affinities, and it is not only a local product but is attested as of Saxon origin by its general character and details.

The seal (pl. xxviii) which has led to the following notes was discovered by the Duke of Rutland among his muniments at Belvoir Castle in 1928 and was exhibited by him to the Society of Antiquaries on December 6th of that year, when I gave a brief description of it. Some apology is owing both to the owner and to the Society for the time that has elapsed without anything being printed about a very interesting find; but the fact is, that it raises a number of points which in 1928 I barely mentioned, but which seemed to meof considerable interestand some importance, and which I designed to study in more detail. Up to the present this detailed study has not proved feasible, and I feel that I must not further delay publication; but I hope that by one hand or another the fuller treatment may yet be accomplished.

In 1929, during the excavation of a prehistoric and Roman site upon Camp Hill in Lord Bledisloe's deer-park at Lydney, on the borders of the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, a reputed earthwork upon the adjoining Little Camp Hill (fig. 1) was trenched and found to contain the remains of a small stone-built castle. The existence of this castle had not been previously noted, as the site has no known history and the remains of the walls are completely covered by the grassgrown banks of their own debris. The site had been regarded locally as that of a small camp, associated with the larger Roman ‘camp’ on the opposite hill. On the Ordnance maps it appears under the name Outpost.

Last year I described before the Society a series of flint implements of Upper Palaeolithic (Upper Mousterian-Aurignacian) facies discovered by me in Yorkshire at the base of, and passing up into, a deposit considered by Lamplugh to resemble a weathered Boulder clay and classed by him as of Late Glacial Age. The geological aspects of these archaeological finds I have dealt with fully in a paper read subsequently to the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia. Both papers, however, were complementary to one read by J.Reid Moir on archaeological discoveries of a similar nature made by him in north-west Norfolk in the Brown Boulder clay. With the objects of obtaining confirmation of Lamplugh's geological opinion and of bridging the gap between north-west Norfolk and Yorkshire, I decided to investigate the glacial sequence in north-east Lincolnshire, choosing Kirmington as a centre.

A Note on the work done during 1930 by the Colchester Excavation Committee has already appeared in this Journal (vol. x, pp. 389–90), and on 12th March of this year, a joint paper, introduced by the Director of Excavations, Mr. J. P. Bushe-Fox, F.S.A., was laid before the Society of Antiquaries by the present writer and his colleagues in the field, Mr. M. R. Hull and Mr. J. N. L. Myres, F.S.A. Since then the Committee has resumed and finished one important part of its task: of the great Celtic site of Camulodunum, the portion to be occupied by the new Colchester By-pass road has now been fully explored from end to end. Mr. Hull, in accomplishing what remained from last year of this work between the middle of August and the 1st June (the limiting date arranged with the road authorities), has thus completed the saving of everything of value in this long strip of land from the destruction which the Committee was first formed to avert. Its responsibilities, however, do not end with this.