Buckinghamshire: the first half-million years!  

That’s almost the title of a new exhibition at the County Museum  that I opened on Saturday. Human: half a million years of life in Buckinghamshire displays a variety of objects to illustrate life in the county from the ice ages to the Tudors. For me, two things in particular stood out. The first is the power of even simple things to excite the imagination. For someone like me who studied the Tudor age at university, loves C H Sansom’s Shardlake novels and has just read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, hats and shoes that were actually worn by our sixteenth century forebears give a direct and when you think about it poignant link to the past. These men and women were real. They got dressed, ate, laughed and wept and went about their lives as we do. Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust”. And then there is the ring from Merovingian France that...