Three of the four main periods of artillery fortification in England, when construction was undertaken on a national scale, are represented in the Thames: the castles and bulwarks of Henry VIII, the bastioned forts of the late seventeenth century, and the Royal Commission forts of the 1860's. The exception is the rather special case of the Martello Tower system, but its place here is taken by the steady improvements carried out at the end of the eighteenth century and in the 1840's and 1850's. Shornemead, Cliffe Creek, and Slough Forts are ruined and derelict, Coalhouse Fort is used as a store, but Tilbury, now in the guardianship of the Ministry of Works, can show the progress of fortification over the course of 250 years. That they never saw the action for which they were designed is irrelevant, for, as Sidney Herbert said in 1860, ‘the object of the fortifications is not so much to resist as to deter attack’.

The subsequent coastal batteries of the last two wars, the hastily constructed pill-boxes, and even the ‘flak’ towers off the east coast are simply gun positions. They are neither self-contained nor self-defensible fortresses. By these criteria the forts erected as a result of the 1860 Royal Commission can be regarded as the last legitimate successors of the prehistoric hill fort and the medieval castle.

The interesting but detestable creature, the subject of these notes, does not seem hitherto to have inspired any enthusiasm in the antiquarian breast, for I have been unable to find any paper relating to it in the journals of archaeological societies. There is, however, a popular account in Princess Mary's Gift-book for 1914, consisting of a translation by the late Teixeira de Mattos of J. H. Fabre's story of the ant-lion and its habits, with a coloured plate, both of which accurately reproduce its pernicious activities.

The final season of excavations at South Cadbury Castle in July–September 1970 produced evidence for a Neolithic ditch. Five phases of remodelling were detected in the Pre-Roman gateway, and two in the Early Post-Roman gate. An important group of bronze brooches was associated with a massacre at the Roman Conquest. In the interior, both circular and rectangular buildings of the Iron Age were uncovered, as well as a building ancillary to the Early Post-Roman hall. Finds included an ΑΝΤΕΘ stater.

The two Saxon urns from Ickwell Bury (pl. xxi, b and c) belong to a small group of special interest to the historian both because it can be closely dated to the earliest years of the Saxon settlement in this country and because its continental connexions are precisely located in the Old Saxon territory between the Elbe and the Weser. Only about a dozen urns exactly of this continental type appear to be known from this country. It is remarkable that, while no more than two or three specimens at most occur among the hundreds of urns from great cemeteries like Lackford or St. John's, Cambridge, the only examples of Anglo-Saxon pottery known from Ickwell should both belong to this unusual and quite distinctive class.

In the following paper a preliminary account is given of some archaeological research which is being carried out, under a grant from the Percy Sladen MemorialFund, in the Hunstanton district of north-west Norfolk.

In the account of excavations at Silchester, given to this Society by Messrs. G. E. Fox and W. H. St. John Hope, in December, 1890, and published in the Archaeologia, attention is called to a very remarkable collection of antiquities which were found in a pit in the part of the town known as Insula I.

The object of the following paper is threefold: first, to give some account of certain relics of pleistocene times, from a cave situated on the south coast of the island of Jersey; secondly, to notice the contents of another cave existing near the north-west corner of the same island, the horizon here being more uncertain, though not improbably pleistocene; and, thirdly, to discuss briefly the general relation of the pleistocene to the post-pleistocene traces of prehistoric man in Jersey in the light of the available evidence, whether archaeological or geological.

This medieval industry was operating one mile south-east of Salisbury at Nat. Grid Ref. SU/160298 (fig. 1). It lay in the Royal Forest of Clarendon, within which there are other hints of the medieval pottery industry. Medieval sherds from Laverstock were first reported by Mr. Frank Stevens in 1940 and in 1955 further finds made during levelling of land formerly used as allotments and from road work were brought into Salisbury Museum. The site was then examined, revealing a twelfth-century cesspit and two pits with pottery wasters of the thirteenth century (one associated with what is now identified as a potters' workshop) but still no kilns. The first kiln was found on a new road line in 1958 and further investigation was aided by a grant from the Ministry of Public Building and Works. During six months trial trenches were opened over 1½ acres; six kilns, two buildings, and eighteen pits (some of them twelfth century) were excavated. Another kiln was found in 1960, and two more in 1963 when a bank at the edge of Duck Lane was levelled, making nine kilns in all. Some were stratigraphically interrelated, and were also in sequence with some pits.

On 2nd February 1962, a group of crushed silver objects was found by Mr. W. F. Curtis at Blackdyke Farm, Hockwold-cum-Wilton, on the south-eastern edge of the Fens (TL 687883, see fig. 1). Though severely damaged and fragmented by deliberate breakage in antiquity and by the effects of burial, the objects were recognizable as Roman silver drinking-cups, some elaborately decorated. They were declared Treasure Trove on 20th February 1962, and were subsequently acquired by the British Museum.

Let into various walls inside the church of St. Mary and St. Hardulph at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, is a group of frieze sculpture and relief-carved panels. It is now generally accepted that these are of Anglo-Saxon origin, and have been reused in the present church, of which no part is earlier than the twelfth century.

Just within the boundaries of the modern Lexden Park, through which runs the innermost of the ancient defensive earthworks of Camulodunum, known in part of its course by the name of Blue Bell Grove, and formerly Hollow Way, lies the tumulus, the excavation of which in July and August 1924 is the subject of this paper. It lay within the great west field of the town, which apparently was not made several till late in the seventeenth century. In 1758 it lay in Mr. B. Evans's paddock. In 1838 the field in which it then lay was called Round Field Hill, which was absorbed into the Park in 1860.

The existence of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery on Broadway Hill was first revealed during quarry workings by the Baillie Brind Quarry Company in the autumn of 1954, when human bones were thrown up by the mechanical digger. The site was visited early in December 1954 by Professor F. W. Shotton of the Department of Geology of Birmingham University and he handled the skeletal remains and some of the finds. The finding of the skeleton was reported to the office of H.M. Coroner at Evesham and, acting on this information, the Evesham Historical Society became interested in the site. Mr. B. G. Cox, the secretary of this society, obtained some finds from the police.

During the autumn of 1946 a hoard of bronzes was discovered during excavation for foundations in the bottom of a down-land valley in the parish of Sompting, near Worthing. The site is a point approximately 300 ft. north-east of Hill Barn and 1,500 ft. south-west of the south-west edge of Lancing Ring, and is on property belonging to Hill Barn Nurseries. The bronzes were unearthed by a mechanical excavator at a depth of about 5 ft. in a valley-bottom accumulation of brown clayey mould. How much of this material is natural hill-wash and how much the result of cultivation of the valley in ancient and modern times it would be difficult to say. The depth at which the bronzes were found suggests that some of the soil may have been ploughed down into the valley bottom at a later period.

The houses with which this paper is concerned belong to the small segment of the eastern slopes of the Pennines known as the ‘Ancient Parish of Halifax’. It is not known when the ‘Ancient Parish’ was formed but the first recorded vicar of Halifax was inducted in 1274 and in that same year the Wakefield Manor Courts ceased to meet in Sowerby Town and made Halifax their centre.

The Ancient Parish covers ten miles of the valley of the river Calder and its tributaries, Halifax itself lying on the Hebble. The area is bleak; it lies, all except the extreme eastern part, on Millstone Grit and rises from a height of some 200 feet above sea level in the valley to an altitude of 1,400 feet. The old settlements mostly lie on the sloping hillsides at an average height of 700 feet.

This paper presents a fresh reading of a significant early medieval recumbent stone monument from West Kirby, Merseyside (formerly Cheshire). Rather than being a single-phased hogback, later subject to damage, it is argued that West Kirby 4 might have been carved in successive phases, possibly by different hands. It is suggested that the carvers had different abilities and/or adapted their work in response to the time pressures of a funeral or a shift in the location or function of the stone. While a single explanation for the character of the West Kirby monument remains elusive, the article proposes that, rather than ‘clumsy and illogical’, the stone was more likely a coherent but experimental, distinctive and asymmetrical, multi-phased and/or multi-authored creation. Through a review of the monument’s historiography and a reappraisal of the details and parallels of its form, ornament and material composition, the paper reconsiders the commemorative significance of this recumbent stone monument for the locality, region and understanding of Viking Age sculpture across the British Isles. As a result, West Kirby’s importance as an ecclesiastical locale in the Viking Age is reappraised.

The paper begins by surveying the different types of early iron-smelting furnace, based on a tentative classification proposed by Coghlan in 1956. The ambiguities in this classification are indicated, together with examples of furnaces that do not fall easily into one of its three categories.

On the basis of data derived principally from furnaces of the Early Iron Age and Roman periods from northern Europe, the author proposes a new classification into two main groups, differentiated by their provisions or otherwise for the removal of molten slag during the iron-smelting operation. Each of these groups is further subdivided, according to the shape of the furnace superstructure and/or the method of supplying the air blast.

The temple and baths dedicated to Sulis Minerva at Aquae Sulis (Bath, Somerset) are usually seen as significant in terms of Britain's ‘Romanization’. However, it is argued here that excavations carried out in the inner precinct of the temple revealed a sequence of great importance in understanding the end of Roman Britain. For the first time the documentary, stratigraphic and artefactual evidence is drawn together alongside a series of new radiocarbon dates which establish the date of the temple's demolition as AD 450–500. This raises interesting questions regarding the process of transformation from Roman to post-Roman in Somerset and beyond.

This article reports excavations undertaken between 1990 and 1994 on a small cliff terrace, at Tintagel Island in Cornwall. This terrace (the Lower Terrace) lies below Site C (the Middle Terrace), where a building was excavated by Dr C.A.R. Radford in the 1930s. The remains uncovered on the Lower Terrace comprise several phases of ephemeral stone and turf structures with associated hearths, floor deposits and stakeholes. These are separated by periods of shillet (tiny flakes of slate in sandy clay soil) levelling. With the collapse of the last structure the terrace was buried by layers of scree and slate slip from the slope above. Artefact groups of fire-lighting stones, whetstones and worked flint and quartz were recovered predominantly from earlier phases, together with Romano-British Native pottery. Later phases mainly comprised sherds of Imported Mediterranean pottery (84 per cent of all finds) and slate disc pot lids. The results of an extensive programme of environmental sampling clarified that a wide range of probably locally growing trees and shrubs were exploited for fuel, as well as for wattles and larger posts and beams. Tiny burnt fragments of animal and some human bone were found scattered through a handful of deposits, but the material is probably residual. A programme of radiocarbon dating was possible with the availability of charcoal material from hearths and stakeholes. This programme, using innovative mathematical modelling techniques, produced three distinct date ranges of structural activity on the Lower Terrace: 395–460 cal AD for one of the earliest phases of hearths, floors and stakeholes pre-dating the occurrence of Imported pottery; 415–535 cal AD for a later structural phase with hearths and first occurrences of Imported and Native pottery together; and 560–670 cal AD for the latest and best surviving structure, with hearths, stakeholes and a large assemblage of Imported pottery.