Looking back over a concern with archaeology which has lasted for half a century I am grateful to have been present through a crucial period in its development.

There were few advantages in my earliest days. On my father’s side I come from a line of farmers, land appraisers, bailiffs and the like which I can trace back in some detail for nearly three hundred years, living for the most part in Northwest Essex; on my mother’s side my ancestors were North Wessex peasants and inn-keepers, with a probable admixture of Welsh cattle-drover blood at the end of the eighteenth century. Wantage and Abingdon were their local centres. All with the exception of one or two backsliders were strict Evangelicals, often wavering on the verge of Dissent, and none ever aspired to any higher standard of education than one who entered the Congregational ministry in 1827. Any known interest in learning or antiquity showed itself more among the Wessex peasants than the clod-hoppers of Essex. My maternal grandfather, who was a native of the Vale of White Horse, was personally known to me and was interested in the many relics of the past observable about him, an intelligent man but with little formal instruction.