A small piece of paper with figures, folded and tucked into a timber joint of Toad Hall . . .

A sherd of stoneware with odd characters, painstakingly incised through hard glaze . . .

A late fourth-century Roman coin from a molehill . . .

Ghosts of boundaries of fields that belonged to Toad Hall when it was a farm . . .

Four fragments among thousands . . .

Numbers on the paper add up to 80 pence, or half a mark, one third of a pound. Why was the paper put into the joint?

Marks on the stoneware resemble short-writing – a 17th-century forerunner of shorthand. What does it say?

The coin is one of a number of metal objects, dating from c.2000 BC to AD 1400, that have turned up in a damp area a few yards across. What connected them?

The field boundaries correspond with those on the 1789 map. How much older were they?

Do such fragments connect? We don’t know. If you visit, we’ll involve you in looking for the answers.