These items, up on a shelf so I couldn’t see them properly, are my favourite objects in the museum. They are clay pots (“beakers”) made by the mysterious Beaker Folk. The Beaker People arrived in the area about two thousand five hundred years ago, and dominated the Neolithic people who were already here. They made their beakers, kept pastoral flocks rather than working the land, and buried their dead in round barrows instead of long barrows. Unlike the Neolithic people who lived in family-based clans the Beaker Folk had kings. Eventually the Beaker Folk were displaced by the Celts (who were in turn displaced by the Saxons) and forced into marginal land and forests where they survived as folk memories of the “little people” (they were physically shorter than the Celts).