Museum and Kinecroft
Start at the museum, cross over the road onto the common. Carry on walking over the path to the far right hand side of the common. Walk up a slope and turn left along the path. keep going straight until you reach the end of the road.

Jill Eyers talks about the geological history of Wallingford

Prehistoric: If you time-travelled to about 140 million years ago you'd be walking amongst the dinosaurs, maybe even one of Oxfordshire's four known dinosaurs, a Eustreptospondylus, Camptosaurus, Megalosaurus, or a Cetiosaurus.

Eustreptospondylus

Oxfordshire has been land for about 40 million years but global temperatures are rising, so watch out for those melting ice caps. Wallingford is about to disappear, engulfed by a deep Jurassic sea.

Grab your magnifying glass and see if you can spy some fossils in the rocks around the town. What you're looking at are traces of some of the sea life that swam in that warm ocean, underneath the land where the museum now stands.

A few million years later and you'd still be underwater (about 200 metres), but some very fine grey/white sand, called Upper Greensand, has now started to form the country's coastline. Stay there long enough, sixty five million years should do it, and your feet will rest on deep levels of chalk.

Look around Wallingford and those hills you see are made of that very same chalk (although they don't appear for quite a few more million years). Now get out your woolly thermals because it's about to get cold - unbelievably cold! Here comes the Ice Age.

Ice Age: We've now leapt forward to 2.6 million years ago. What you're looking at is freezing cold and two miles high. You're not going to escape this big sheet of ice heading for you here in Wallingford.

We're not quite sure if it's going to just touch the edge of the town or cover us right over, but we do know that it's going to carve up the countryside and make the river paths you see today. The River Thames is now being diverted towards Goring and London. Grab a handful of stones from the river bed and see if you can find some of the three different types of gravel left behind by this colossal ice sheet. Those angular pebbles with jagged edges reveal the legacy of freeze-thaw action of the ice age. See a map of the ancient river gravels.

Island Britain: Sea levels have risen and we have now become an island cut off from Europe. This is a crucial time in our development as all animals and plants have suddenly become endemic - that means no more species can now join Island Britain. We have become unique and very different from the rest of the continent.

Judy Dewey talks about the histoy of Wallingford

Anglo Saxons: Have a look at the green earthwork banks surrounding the Kinecroft.

Kinecroft

Travel back in time to the tenth century and you're now looking at the fortifications of this new Saxon town, founded by King Alfred. Standing on the top of the banks, looking down to the ditches below, you can see just how high these fortifications would have been, providing excellent defence against the Vikings. The Normans may have even been your friends, as the people of Wallingford allowed them to cross the bridge unopposed back in that famous year 1066.

Get out your excavation tools, do a bit of digging and you'll realise you are standing on the edge of a Saxon pagan burial ground. As a Saxon resident you can proudly claim that Wallingford is bigger than Oxford and equal in size to the capital of the kingdom of Wessex, Winchester. You could be bringing your cattle along here to graze and if you lived in medieval times you could even be turning up for a Love Day to watch the locals sort out their differences by having a public fight!

Malcolm Airs talks about Wallingford building materials

Industries: Your Saxon house made of mud, (locally known as Cob) would have been replaced by a timber built building in medieval times. But come the 16th century, fashions dictated that timber be covered with flint and chalk, so your house may have looked more like the museum as you see it today. This fine gabled front of flint and stone dates to the early 17th century and conceals an earlier timber-framed structure, possibly of late 15th century, which is clearly visible inside the museum.

One of the local industries here was brick building and you may have used some of the distinctive blue coloured local brick when building your house in the 18th century. The railways, when they arrived in the 19th century have now given you the chance to use other building stuff such as slate from Wales and cheaper bricks from the midlands.