The decipherment in 1952 by Michael Ventris of the prehistoric script known as Minoan Linear B at once suggested that here lay the key to the earlier Cretan script called Linear A. Linear B was proved to be a syllabic script which represented, imperfectly but just adequately, the Greek language in a form more archaic than any other surviving records. At an early stage in our short-lived partnership I discussed with Ventris the possibility of applying the results to the older script, and we both made certain experiments; but we concluded that the situation did not allow any easy progress, and being deeply committed to the development of his Linear B theory, we decided to leave this field to others, at any rate for the time being. Since then a great deal of work on Linear A has been published by other scholars, almost all of it based upon the decipherment of Linear B, and equally inspired by the success which attended the solution of the major problem. It is not, perhaps, too soon to review some of these attempts and appraise the progress made so far. We are clearly far from an agreed solution; but there are encouraging signs that the true solution is not too far beyond our grasp, though I for one doubt whether it can be achieved by mere ingenuity. I should like to emphasize at the outset that I am completely neutral in the controversies which are raging, and this account is intended to be quite impartial.

‘There is one straung thing seen ther that in certen Partes of the Ground withyn the Waulles, the Corne is mervelus faire to the Yee, and ready to show Perfecture, it decayith’.

This passage, written by John Leland (1503-1552) after his visit to Silchester in 1541, is perhaps the earliest recorded observation of a cropmark. His account of Silchester was used by most serious workers on the site for the next two hundred years, and treated with the respect it deserved. Willian Camden used it on his visit, and we are not surprised to read in Britannia:

‘The inhabitants of this place told me, it had been a constant observation of theirs, that though the soil here be fat and fertile, yet in a sort of baulks that cross one another, the corn never grows so thick as in the other parts of the field; and along these they imagine the streets of the old city to have run. Here are commonly dug up British Tiles and great plenty of Roman Coins’.

The late Editor and Founder of ANTIQUITY had to deal with a difficult monument when he wrote his Long Barrows of the Cotwolds (1925). This was the Three Shire Stones which stand in an alcove in the wall on the west side of the Foss Way, two miles north of Batheaston, at the junction of Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire and the parishes of Batheaston, Marshfield and Colerne. Here are three uprights supporting a capstone. Inside is a broken boundary stone bearing the date 1736, and on the 2-in. manuscript map of the district at the Ordnance Survey (dated 1813–14) there is a note saying ‘Shire Stones, erected 1736’. As Crawford wrote, ‘The present structure is evidently a modem imitation of a “dolmen”.’

If we all accept the Three Shire Stones as an 18th-century ‘dolmen’, as we must, it prompts us to wonder what other megalithic imitations or ‘follies’ were constructed in England.

In 1792 Lord Arundel employed Josiah Lane to make a grotto for him at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. Lane was a celebrated constructor of rock-work and his grotto at Wardour is a most remarkable and charming structure. To quote Barbara Jones’s description of it: ‘Built on a brick basis, it is of tufa and stone with the usual occasional ammonite, now covered with green moss and long ferns, for it is in a very sheltered and gloomy situation. The plan is most cunning, turning in and out with many views through jagged holes into other parts. The dark yews and the bank which it is built against, and the patternbook construction, make it the most Gothic of grottoes.’ Apparently Josiah Lane in his rock-work used part of a chamber tomb on Place Farm, Tisbury: three stones from this tomb were removed in 1792 and used at Wardour Castle.