At the end of this first full year of my office as your President I wish to thank every Fellow of the Society for the kindness and support that they have shown me and naturally above all I must thank my fellow officers whose patience and counsel have been unbounded. 1967 is an important year for the Society, for in it we celebrate our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. The Council has considered what should be done to mark this occasion and it has been decided that this will take the form of an Anniversary Party to beheld from 5.30 to 8.30 p.m. on Thursday, the 12th of October. There will be some guests, but Fellows will be asked to subscribe towards their own entertainment. Two hundred and fifty years is half five hundred years, yet I still feel that the Old Lady of Burlington House is quite young for her age. Long may she remain so, and it is right and proper to salute the young as well as the not so young who make up our membership and to beg them to keep her ever in her pristine freshness and enterprise.

The earliest record of the Henge at Durrington Walls, in the parish of Durrington, Wiltshire (SU. 150437) (location map, fig. 1), is that made in the early nineteenth century by Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1812, p. 169). Today, the bank and ditch of the henge have been largely either ploughed flat or masked by comparatively modern accumulations of plough-soil and there is little to indicate to the casual visitor that these degraded earthworks represent all that is left of the largest henge monument in Britain.

The Cirencester Excavation Committee conducted two sets of excavations in 1966: at Easter, four weeks were spent excavating the Saxon church and an internal tower on the Roman defences; during the Summer, in a six week campaign, various development sites in the town were examined (fig. 1) and sections were cut across the seating bank of the amphitheatre.

The drawing fig. I, by Mrs. Marion Cox, and photograph pl. xxxix a, by Mr. R. L. Wilkins, were made while this urn was on loan to the University Institute of Archaeology at Oxford, soon after discovery in November 1965. A cinerary urn, it was found in the course of mechanical digging for sand on land at Milton Malsor, formerly owned by Mrs. Raynsford of Milton Malsor Manor, now owned and worked by Milton Sand, Ltd., and is published here by their permission. The firm being grouped under Mixoconcrete (Holdings) Ltd., possession of the urn remains with this company's Board of Directors, at Little Billing near Northampton. Milton (name contracted from ‘Middleton’) is some three miles south-south-west of Northampton and its ancient passage of the Nene (fig. 2), on the Lias sands of the first ridge south from the landmark hill of Hunsbury; the road south-west from there, crossing the ridge a mile to westward as ‘Banbury Lane’, here represents the old main trackway from the Humber down to the Cotswolds.

The bronze animal-headed torc from Vieille-Toulouse, Haute Garonne, which forms part of the Morel Collection now in the British Museum (pls. xl a–b; xli a; fig. 1; diameter 14 cm.), has been but briefly mentioned in print by Jacobsthal, Morel himself, and others and little attention has been paid to its possible stylistic affiliations; the following notes attempt to fill the gap.

The multiplicity of terms used to blazon crosses and the diversity of manners in which they were depicted constitute one of the most confusing aspects of medieval heraldry. Sir William St. John Hope deplored this situation in the following terms:

As regards the cross, heraldic writers have gone mad, and from the few simple crosses of pre-Tudor days there have been evolved scores of fantastic forms for which it would be difficult to find instances outside the heraldry books. In the Glossary of Heraldry, published in 1847, upwards of fifty varieties are enumerated, and there are other modern works in which they exceed two hundred!

One evening towards the end of August 1964, Mr. G. H. Bell walked across to the excavations north of Winchester Cathedral and told the writer that some pots had been found during the digging of a new sewer trench opposite his house in Grange Road, Winchester. The site of the discovery was visited the same evening and the pots, which later proved to have come from Grave I, at once showed that the find was of Roman date. Immediate inspection revealed one pit, later numbered Grave II, in the east side of the sewer trench. The following day a talk with Mr. Butcher of King's Worthy, who had been driving the mechanical digger excavating the trench, revealed the full story of the discovery.

In 1966 the Winchester Excavations Committee was again joined by the University of North Carolina and Duke University in excavations on four sites in the city. The work lasted ten weeks from the middle of June to the latter part of August and an average of 160 people took part, about £14,000 being spent.