WHAT was a Roman cavalry unit doing at Credenhill around the time of the birth of Christianity?

Where were Herefordshire’s earliest known timber-framed buildings to be found nearly 4,000 years before this?

And why was Herefordshire a ‘land of ironworking’ across 2,000 years up to the early 19th century?

Answers to these questions, among many others, are provided in the newly-published book, The Archaeology of Herefordshire: An Exploration.

Written by Keith Ray, Herefordshire’s County Archaeologist between 1998 and 2014, the book spans the millennia from stone hand-axes used close to a prehistoric ‘Mathon River’ flowing beneath the Malvern Hills before the later Ice Ages, to 1980s British Telecom wayside telephone kiosks abandoned within the last decade.

Assisted by around 250 illustrations, nearly all in colour, the author presents a panorama of the archaeology of the county, looking at individual objects as well as sites and landscapes that illuminate the story.

The book includes chapters on the earliest times, on the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and on the Iron Age with its dramatic earthwork ‘hill-forts’ including such well-known sites as British Camp on the crest of the Malvern Hills. Further chapters review what is known about Herefordshire in Roman times, and in the years leading up to the Norman Conquest, while two chapters look at castles and then at more modest settlements in the Middle Ages.

The history of ironworking in the county, especially in the Ross-on-Wye area, gets a chapter devoted to its several fascinating by-ways, and the story is brought up to date with a final chapter on Herefordshire in the last few centuries.

In the book's epilogue we learn why the bull, rather than the apple, really is the proper symbol of the county’s history, in reference to a bronze bull’s head bucket-attachment dating to the Roman centuries retrieved from a field at Kenchester, the Roman ‘capital’ of the Herefordshire district, located four miles west of Hereford city.

The book focuses especially upon recent discoveries. Sir Roy Strong writes in his foreword: "Readers will also be struck that the material gathered here, the work of a small army of archaeologists, comes largely from the last three decades. So this book tells us where we have got in an ongoing saga of discovery."

The book is available in bookshops across the county and also in places such as The Old House Museum, Off the Wall gift shop in High Town Hereford, Oakchurch Farm Shop, Pengethley Garden Centre, The Hop Pocket and several other outlets, or from logastonpress.co.uk.