Museum
and Kinecroft
  Jill
Eyers talks about the geological history of Wallingford
Prehistoric:
If you time-travelled to about 140 million years ago you'd be walking
amongst the dinosaurs, maybe even one of Oxfordshire's four known dinosaurs,
a Eustreptospondylus, Camptosaurus, Megalosaurus, or a Cetiosaurus.
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| Eustreptospondylus |
Oxfordshire
has been land for about 40 million years but global temperatures are rising,
so watch out for those melting ice caps. Wallingford is about to disappear,
engulfed by a deep Jurassic sea.
Grab your
magnifying glass and see if you can spy some fossils in the rocks around
the town. What you're looking at are traces of some of the sea life that
swam in that warm ocean, underneath the land where the museum now stands.
A few million
years later and you'd still be underwater (about 200 metres), but some
very fine grey/white sand, called Upper Greensand, has now started
to form the country's coastline. Stay there long enough, sixty five million
years should do it, and your feet will rest on deep levels of chalk.
Look around
Wallingford and those hills you see are made of that very same chalk (although
they don't appear for quite a few more million years). Now get out your
woolly thermals because it's about to get cold - unbelievably cold! Here
comes the Ice Age.
 Ice
Age: We've now leapt forward to 2.6 million years ago. What you're
looking at is freezing cold and two miles high. You're not going to escape
this big sheet of ice heading for you here in Wallingford.
We're not
quite sure if it's going to just touch the edge of the town or cover us
right over, but we do know that it's going to carve up the countryside
and make the river paths you see today. The River Thames is now being
diverted towards Goring and London. Grab a handful of stones from the
river bed and see if you can find some of the three different types of
gravel left behind by this colossal ice sheet. Those angular pebbles with
jagged edges reveal the legacy of freeze-thaw action of the ice age. See a map of the ancient river gravels.
Island
Britain: Sea levels have risen and we have now become an island cut
off from Europe. This is a crucial time in our development as all animals
and plants have suddenly become endemic - that means no more species can
now join Island Britain. We have become unique and very different from
the rest of the continent.
 Judy
Dewey talks about the histoy of Wallingford
Anglo
Saxons: Have a look at the green earthwork banks surrounding the Kinecroft.
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| Kinecroft |
Travel back
in time to the tenth century and you're now looking at the fortifications
of this new Saxon town, founded by King Alfred. Standing on the top of
the banks, looking down to the ditches below, you can see just how high
these fortifications would have been, providing excellent defence against
the Vikings. The Normans may have even been your friends, as the people
of Wallingford allowed them to cross the bridge unopposed back in that
famous year 1066.
Get out your
excavation tools, do a bit of digging and you'll realise you are standing
on the edge of a Saxon pagan burial ground. As a Saxon resident you can
proudly claim that Wallingford is bigger than Oxford and equal in size
to the capital of the kingdom of Wessex, Winchester. You could be bringing
your cattle along here to graze and if you lived in medieval times you
could even be turning up for a Love Day to watch the locals sort out their
differences by having a public fight!
 Malcolm
Airs talks about Wallingford building materials
Industries:
Your Saxon house made of mud, (locally known as Cob) would have been replaced
by a timber built building in medieval times. But come the 16th century,
fashions dictated that timber be covered with flint and chalk, so your
house may have looked more like the museum as you see it today. This fine
gabled front of flint and stone dates to the early 17th century and conceals
an earlier timber-framed structure, possibly of late 15th century, which
is clearly visible inside the museum.
One of the
local industries here was brick building and you may have used some of
the distinctive blue coloured local brick when building your house in
the 18th century. The railways, when they arrived in the 19th century
have now given you the chance to use other building stuff such as slate
from Wales and cheaper bricks from the midlands.
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