So the envelope arrived from the Heritage Lottery Fund and when I opened it the first word I read was 'Congratulations..'  'Fantastic!', I thought, swiftly followed by 'What have I done...?'  I am not a historian or an archaeologist.  I have a keen interest in history and heritage - I've written about the English Civil War, made films about Victorian Britain, campaigned to save the Roman Circus in Colchester - but prehistory?  What do I know about ancient history?  Worryingly, the answer is very little.

It's all Michael Woods fault - I loved his series 'The Great British Story - A People's History' which told the history of the country through the eyes of one village, with the participation of the villagers.  So when the HLF ran a new fund called 'All our Stories' in support of the series with the specific aim to explore the heritage on your doorstep, I wanted in.

I volunteer with Wormingford Community Education Centre and the area around the village has more than it's fair share of historical interest.  The name itself has it's origin in dragon stories, which is a great start.  There are archaeological remains from the neolithic period onwards.  The Romans were here - I've picked up bagfuls of Roman brick and tile on a previous fieldwalk nearby.

I got talking to the local experts - members of Colchester Archaeological Group who have surveyed, researched, fieldwalked, dug and reported on finds in the area.  One site in particular caught my imagination (probably because I'm a hopeless romantic), located in the river valley visible only from cropmarks indicating numerous ancient man-made structures with an account by a 19th century clergyman who witnessed the destruction of a barrow there which contained 'hundreds of urns in rows... like streets'.  Even better, there are numerous theories about that story - someone even claiming that the urns contained what was left of the 9th Roman legion!

I began to think about a project based on this site but it was daunting - what could we add to the existing knowledge?  What possible connections could we make to a people who lived here so long ago, who left no written word behind them?  The starting point had to be the cropmarks - those enigmatic traces of human interaction with the landscape....