The countryside of what is now Acton was moulded and eroded by successive ice-sheets of the last 500,000 years. 

The gravel from the former Acton Stone Pits was glacial Outwash probably from the Lowestoft glaciations of approx. 450,000 years ago when the great ice-sheets, advancing from the West covered all East Anglia, converting it into an Arctic Landscape. In this gravel were found in 1908, the relics of Stone Age Man - three worked flints. Their state of preservation and their workmanship suggests, however, that they are more recent than the gravel in which they were found. 

They are Palaeolithic flakes of the Late Middle Pleistocene, making them up to 200,000 years old, and they were struck by the Levalloisian technique. 

When the Stone Age man worked his flints, the land around Acton was probably an open grassy plain with patches of mixed forest, in which hornbeam was common. The men, who were of course hunters, would have met mammoth, rhinoceros, bison and herds of wild horses. In the woods there would have been red deer, the great Irish deer, the aurochs, bear, wild pig, and wolves. 

Man himself was probably not dissimilar from twentieth century man, dressed in skins and living in crude shelters. 

There is evidence of man's continuing presence in the countryside down through the centuries - one of the earliest known lamps, probably 13,000 years old, was found only three miles away and a Neolithic chisel was found at Chilton near Sudbury.

The Romans - and Boadicea, perhaps.

Acton, as such, did not exist in Roman times but there is evidence of Roman influence, activity and occupation in the parish, and perhaps a few words on its tribal connections would be of interest. 

The region, before Caesar's invasion, was in the tribal area of the Trinovantes who, together with the Cantuvellauni, were ruled over by Cunobelin, one of the few Iron Age chiefs of whom much is known. He is Shakespeare's Cymbeline and had his capital at Colchester, thus giving that city the possible right to call itself the oldest city in Britain. 

These twin tribes, under his sons Togodumnus and the better known Caratacus, put up a very fierce resistance to the Roman invasion, to such an extent that when Caratacus was eventually captured he was paraded in chains through Rome. 

The Trinovantes, possibly because of this resistance, suffered rather under Roman occupation and when the neighbouring tribe in the North, the Iceni, under Queen Boadicea, rose in rebellion, the Trinovantes joined them readily, marching with them to burn Colchester and London to the ground. 

One of the only two known roads from the Iceni territory to Colchester passes through what is now Acton, so it seems quite possible that at least some of Boadicea's leeni  and Trinovantes actually surged through Lime Tree Park Estate and the High Street. This Roman road from Colchester to lxworth crossed another east-west road near Bassett's Farm. It is interesting to note that both the Roman objects discovered in Acton (a marble head and a hand mill stone) were found almost exactly on the assumed line of this east-west road.