occupiers of the two farms were John  Whitehead and John Charlton, as ‘Wades Executors’. As appears from that agreement, Chapel Wood had grown no more. The adjacent Chapel Field, which as Dr Thorpe had noted was traversed by the parish boundary, was part not of Old House but of Fairby Farm in Hartley. Fairby had long been owned and farmed by the Treadwells, a rather remarkable family in which to die an octogenarian was to die young.
   Scotgrove slept on into the present century, when its peace was disturbed by the building of a few houses along the Ash road, some with gardens that bit into Chapel Wood as far as the track from West Yoke to Hartley. Early in 1926, the owner of one such house, a Mr A.J. Dennis, showed to the then rector of Hartley, the Revd. G.W. Bancks, a piece of red tile that he had dug up in his garden. The rector inspected the site, thought

that Mr Dennis had struck a hypocaust and called in expert advice. What exactly the experts said does not appear, but the All Saints’, Hartley Magazine for March of that year reported that excavations were proceeding and the June issue described in some detail the ‘hypocaust or heating chamber’ which had, by then, been exposed and reproduced photographs of it taken for the now defunct Daily Graphic. A picture showing two excavators at work with common or garden fork and spade, which is more readily accessible in Mr Bancks’ book, Hartley Through the Ages, does not suggest that the work was carried out with any remarkable degree of expertise, but something of importance had undoubtedly been found. The description was of a chamber, measuring sixteen feet by ten feet, enclosed within walls of flint stone set in