The church itself is one of the oldest standing church buildings in England, with fabric dating back to Anglo-Saxon times.

The churchyard had been out of regular use for long enough that the deeper medieval layers retained their integrity.

Archaeologists recognized that the site offered an unusually complete window into burial practice across many centuries.

The excavations ran from 1978 through to 1984, with additional recording work continuing into the 2000s.

Over those decades, the team recovered and recorded more than 2,800 individual burials, spanning from the early medieval period through to the eighteenth century.

That scale is extraordinary.