No worries about health and safety in 1965!

Director David Ford (left) with Terry Barry (right), Ralph and American volunteer Larry Katzenbach (son of the then US Attorney General) pose in one of the deep, narrow trenches that were cut across the moat of Tong Castle (perhaps a motte and bailey castle, though probably a moated manor house), east of Sittingbourne, Kent.

These slit trenches were potentially very dangerous of course, but we were innocent of such concerns.

The excavation revealed significant amounts of C13th/C14th domestic pottery and some collapsed shelly-mortared masonry, but was never published. David Ford left his teaching post at St John's Secondary Modern School, Sittingbourne, and moved to Canada.

However, working at the site did serve to infect Ralph with a love of archaeology of which he has never been entirely cured! The Sittingbourne and Swale Archaeological Research Group also owed its foundation to the dig at Tong.

To the north of the mound was a large pond, on which lived hundreds of ducks. These supplied eggs to the bakery then in Tong Mill, a handsome structure that is still much as it was then. At the time there was a tumbledown cottage beside the "castle". It was later demolished and an ugly bungalow built to replace it.

There is now public access to Tong Pond opposite the Castle.