I went up to the site of the Riverside Project the other day. I wanted to record how little sign the archaeologists had left in their passing, and I wasn’t disappointed. There was absolutely nothing to indicate they’d ever been there, except for the slight tracks they, and their vehicles had left.I especially wanted to see the Cuckoo Stone, in the vicinity of which several significant finds had been made … a child burial, and the skeleton of a dog. But, they told me it may be several years before it’s determined exactly how old they are.

Yes, I know the fictional forensic scientist on TV can make a cursory examination and say ‘This is a female child aged 8 years and four months, who deceased at about 11.49 am on the 9^th February, 785 BC by choking on her barley broth.’ But, I suspect such a character belongs exclusively to fiction.

It would be nice to believe she was buried with a beloved pet, who’d died at the same time, but there’s no reason to believe the dog was contemporary; it may be, I was told, as little as a hundred years old. (That’s an archaeologist for you … he thinks a century ago is only recently!)

There were three theories about how the Cuckoo Stone came to be where it was. It’s the same kind of sarsen used at Stonehenge, which was brought over thirty miles, from Lockeridge Down. The first is that it was brought here by glacier action … an ‘erratic’, as they say in the trade. The second is, it was on its way to Stonehenge, when the word came that they had enough stones, thank you, and it was just left there. The third is that it came from Stonehenge … carried away in a fit of religious zealotry, or just as a source of building stone, and abandoned for some reason.

But, during the dig, they found a hole which may have been the socket the stone once stood in. If that’s true, it blows all three theories out of the water!