A WILTSHIRE town can now lay claim to the title of the oldest town in Britain.
The discovery of Stone Age flints dating from 2,500BC means that people have lived in Malmesbury for 4,500 years.
Archaeologists believe that the town sprung up from a Neolithic site as important as Avebury or Stonehenge.
But researchers have little chance of discovering the extent of the development because it will have been destroyed by thousands of years of building.
The dig, which discovered the flint, was at St Joseph's Roman Catholic School and aimed to find medieval town walls as English Heritage was funding a multi million pound scheme for repairs.
But what astonished the diggers was the discovery of a six ft wide Iron Age wall close to the site of the medieval one.
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