When I arrived at Fountains Abbey, trowel primed, eager to get at the monkish treasure, and was promptly led away to an open field where a herd of deer were casually grazing, I was initially disappointed. Excited for the deer (there were hundreds of them), but essentially disappointed. We were not digging up Fountains Abbey, but Studley Hall, an 18th century manor house that burned down in 1946. I was even more disappointed. As an Anglo-Saxonist, I am quite used to the jibes of prehistorians asking why Anglo-Saxon archaeologists bother when we have written records. How very wrong they are. How shallow their grasp of the archaeological discipline. And now I can see how ignorant I too was. What I thought was going to be a monotonous trudge through modern rubble, turning out bits of plastic, iron brackets and electric wire, turned into a highly stimulating and thoroughly unique excavation.