I placed the finds gallery on the home page, so that site visitors come into contact with the finds before anything else. But finds mean little when they are seen out of their context, so on this page, I have prepared a short history of the landscape in which they were recovered. The area is situated on a thick layer of glacial till or boulder-clay deposited over a geology of chalk. This till extends through Mid and South Norfolk and High Suffolk to form the East Anglian Boulder-Clay Plateau .
Soils consist of medium to heavy clays and loamy clays, rich in broken flints.
Natural drainage is poor, and the fields are bordered by land drainage systems. Local topography is characterised by dispersed settlement - with farms scattered along the edge of what were once commons, rather than forming tight nucleated villages. The main crops of the modern landscape are wheat, barley, and sugar beet, with some livestock pastures near the edge of the becks. Although the landscape today is very open and windswept, local place-names suggest the existence of substantial woodlands in the Late Saxon Period. The landscape is also situated in an area known as the Central Norfolk Watershed , where archaeological finds of some periods appear to be lower than in the surrounding area.