It was a snapshot of 1928. A one-metre square test pit on the Cottenham village green during the Fen Edge Family Festival 09 (FEFF) revealed a broad range of items thrown away in 1928 to fill in a pond that had been at the northern end of the green until then.
 The Fen Edge Archaeology Group had agreed to participate in the FEFF, held in Cottenham, to help promote an understanding of archaeology and further understanding of one of the villages in the Fen Edge Community Association patch. We agreed to dig a test pit on the village green, the centre of the activities over the festival weekend.
 Preparation included obtaining the consent of the Cottenham Parish Council and their acceptance that digging on the green would be ‘with a view to the better enjoyment of the village green’. We were given their enthusiastic support.
 We did not prescribe or express any preference about where on the green we  dug the pit except that we needed to be away from trees and that we needed enough space for spoil and a table-top display within a fenced off area. We were allocated a place on the north-west side (not far from the pump). We chose a place there which was just to the west of the line of a narrow trench, recently dug to take an electricity cable to the southern end of the green.
It turned out that we were close to the edge of the former pond.
The finds were of interest to a great number of visitors to the festival. A member of FEAG was available nearly all day on each of Saturday and Sunday to explain what we were doing, how and why, and to show the artefacts as they emerged.
The first finds were, as might be expected, relatively modern and included, in the first 10 centimetre layer, a 1971 penny and pieces of a plastic comb.
We had been told that bottles and other glassware had been turned up by those using a mechanical digger to put in the electricity cable just a few weeks earlier and we surmised that this may have had something to do with the former Cross Keys pub which stood nearby, and so we expected that we might find the same.
It was only when we dug to a depth of about 20cm that the intriguing collection of finds began to reveal themselves and that we started to realise that this was associated with the pond that had been at the north end of the green. Photographs used in the Cottenham in Focus publication by the Village Society and on display at the festival helped us locate the edge of the pond and relate the location of our pit to it. The village pump seen in those pictures was nearer to the centre of the green than it is now and its former position is identifiable from an access cover now at that point. We were digging into the shallow part of the old pond.
 Later inspection of Parish Council records showed that the District Council had decided that the pond should be filled in and, over a three day period in April 1928, local residents had been invited to deposit their non-burnable rubbish into it. Although we cannot discount the possibility that rubbish may have been thrown in before that date, we believe that our finds represent significantly what was deposited in those three days.
 Significant finds started appearing as we got down to about 20cm and got denser as we dug deeper. Most were, not surprisingly, down on the bottom of the pond. We were fortunate to have been digging reasonably near to the pond’s edge. The finds included bottles, jars, a bicycle, metal pots, cans, a kettle and radio batteries. There was a large quantity of broken crockery and unidentifiable, badly deteriorated rusty sheets of metal.
 The bottles included one with the word ‘Monsters’ down the side. This caused great amusement since a theme of the festival used for the model-making competition had been ‘monsters’!
 Other finds that drew particular interest were stoneware ginger beer bottles with the name ‘F H Ivatt Cottenham’ on them. They were not for sale but we had several offers to buy them during the festival.
 The part of the bicycle that revealed itself in our pit was the front end. We had the handlebars and front forks, the chain wheel, fragments of the front wheel and fragments of the front tyre. The bicycle had to remain there because the remainder of it was under the adjacent ground, no doubt with a wealth of other interesting objects.
 Objects were protruding from all four of the pit walls and eventually made it difficult for us to continue digging down. Our task was to sample the archaeology of the green just in that 1 metre square so those items remained in place. We stopped when we reached the silty bottom of the pond, at a depth of about 50cm. By then, time had run out and we had to finish recording the dig, backfill the pit and replace the turf. We therefore did not find out how thick was the layer of silt or what might have been below it.
 Some of the finds have been displayed when the FEAG has had a stall at local events. A full report is being completed.