Shadowy fgures inhabit the seventh century – names without bodies, bodies without names. Their legacy comes from diverse sources, from rare conserved manuscripts and from numerous graves and artefacts buried under the ground. Pieced together from king-lists and Bede is a sequence of East Anglian kings, members of the Wufnga dynasty that would endure until the mid-eighth century. In addition, thousands of men, women and children have been rediscovered in their graves, along with their dogs and horses. We can give names to none of them, although all were individuals. And there is a special group of people, seldom encountered in their burials but declared by their handiwork: gold and garnet weaponry, brooches of gilt bronze, necklaces of coloured beads, intricate animal patterns on the jewellery of humans, solemn human faces on the harness of horses. And there are Old England's placenames that survive in every part, and there are East Anglia's rivers which still fow, their tides still drawing steadily in and out. On a summer morning on the River Deben you can still see and smell and hear the same landscape with the same birds and same trees and weeds, and no more sounds of travel than a shout and the slap of a sail.

How daring can we be with words and pictures to remake the past? Can we capture its challenges, anxieties and exhilarations with any conviction? Can we ever reproduce, by rediscovering their swords and bridles, or the lines of vanished ship, a moment of ancient thrill or trauma or triumph that may come to life today? One way is to think one's way into such moments and imagine and write about them; but another is to relive them today.