the far south of the parish where burial mounds have been traced. In both cases the burials had been made on what was then the fringe of the likely cultivated area. Their style indicates the development of an upper class. New lords arose soon after 500 BC when the warlike, artistic Celts brought access to iron, a far stronger and more accessible metal than bronze. Iron axes and iron-shod ploughs may well now have made inroads into the heavily forested claylands. Forty-three pieces of Iron Age pottery have been found close by the church, indicating that occupation continued in this area. By the first century AD the people of Norfolk and north Suffolk had become a single tribe, the Iceni, and coins of this age inscribed IC.DURO.T are reported to have been found in Tasburgh. Chapel Hill, a knoll in the water meadows west of Tasburgh Hall, has produced extensive evidence of ancient burials. Ditch digging south west of the hillock in 1923 revealed several complete and broken amphorae (large wine jars). These were of a type used to transport Mediterranean wine in the first century AD. At this time wine was a rare luxury in Britain, consumed by the nobility, who had the habit of incorporating amphorae with the grave goods of their dead chieftains. This may signify that Chapel Hill is the burial site of an Icenian noble. Roman Tasburgh After the Romans invaded Britain in AD 43 the Iceni became a client kingdom falling under full Roman rule following their revolt under Queen Boudica in AD 60. The most impressive sign of Roman times in Tasburgh was and remains the trunk road running from south to north across the parish, now the A140 which runs from Norwich to Ipswich. The road was constructed to link important Roman towns at London and Colchester with the newly established capital of the Iceni, Venta Icenorum, which stood alongside the River Tas at Caistor St Edmund. Built in a series of straight alignments thrust remorselessly across existing field patterns it stood on a thirty feet wide embankment. The roadway itself was twenty feet wide with a steeply cambered surface of hard packed gravel. With little maintenance from the end of the Roman era in AD 410 to the building of a turnpike in 1768, the embankment and road surface were worn down and the road fell away from its straight alignment