easily range through the wooded slopes on either side of the valleys of the Tas and the Hempnall stream, fishing, picking hazel nuts and berries or hunting deer, wild cattle and wild pigs. More of their flints have turned up higher on the valley slopes near the village hall and the church. Sometimes the chase must have taken them up into a dense forest of oak, elm and lime cloaking the flat clay land above the valleys, the area now called Upper Tasburgh. To obtain sufficient food the small group of hunters would need constantly to move around an area far wider than Tasburgh. Their only easy route would be along the strip of open woodland on the light soils of the valley sides, sandwiched between the river marshes and the dark forest on the higher ground. The line of Saxlingham Lane and Low Road follows this route and leads to both of the fords. By around 4000 BC the hunter bands had become merged with incoming Neolithic farmers. With flint axes and fire, patches of the valleyside woodland had been cleared for crops of primitive wheat and barley. Flint fragments from the farmer's tools have been found spread widely across the area enclosed by Grove Lane, Low Road and Church Hill where sites were likely to have been cultivated in rotation as the poorly manured soil became exhausted. Domesticated cattle, sheep and pigs would have been pastured on the marshes and in the woodland glades. Flints of these early farmers have never been found on the higher ground of Upper Tasburgh north of Church Road and east of Old Hall Farm, where the thick forest and heavy clay soil seems to have resisted clearance and cultivation. Some of these Neolithic people lived in what is now the eastern end of the churchyard where sherds of their pottery have been found together with pot boilers and considerable evidence of flint working. Their homes would have been circular thatched huts with wattle walls marking the beginning of human occupation in the area of the church. After 2500 BC came the knowledge of making tools and weapons of copper then of bronze – far more adaptable and effective materials than flint in most cases. Relics of the Bronze Age have been unearthed in Henry Preston Road where a distinctive beaker marked a probable early Bronze Age burial and behind Hall Farm in