ABSTRACT
History surrounds us. The oldest structure above ground inCambridge, where I live, is the endearingly clumsy towerof St Benet’s Church, built getting on for a thousand years ago by masons who seem to have lacked confidence in their work. There are Roman bricks in the walls of St Peter’s, north of the river, where the ‘very minor’ Roman settlement was – the church was built in the twelfth century and more or less rebuilt at the end of the eighteenth. In May 1903 the grave of a wealthy Iron Age man was discovered in a drainage trench on the western outskirts of the town. The grave goods it contained – bronze brooches, an arm ring and horse-ornaments – are in the collection of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
