THE director of a family farm business who had a passion for archaeology and local history has passed away.

Dr Janey Cumber, pictured, of Manor Farm, Marcham, died suddenly at home on January 26, aged 61.

As director and company secretary she played a key role in developing the farming business with her husband, William Cumber.

The couple were to become known well beyond farming circles as a result of excavations on their land off the A338, at the site of the former inn, the Noah’s Ark.

Born Janey Lampitt in Assam, India, where her father was a tea planter, she came to England aged eight to stay with her grandparents and attend Abbey School, Reading.

After graduating from St Andrew’s University with a degree in Medieval History in 1973 she came to Oxford to acquire a secretarial qualification.

Her school friend, Mary Cumber, suggested they move in with her brother William at Manor Farm and the couple went on to get married in 1976.

She briefly worked in London for the Salters Company, but following her marriage returned to Oxford as personal secretary to the bursar of The Queen’s College, where she stayed until the Cumbers’ first son was born in 1979.

She became increasingly involved in the farm and the record keeping of cows, graded up to pedigree status.

The farm had one of the highest-yielding herds in the UK before converting to organic status in 2001.

She was also closely involved in the business’s change to beef production.

Dr Cumber returned to studying in 1999, taking an undergraduate certificate in Local History at Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education.

Her chance meeting with the archaeologist Gary Lock was to result in an 11-year dig on the family’s land, with an Iron Age settlement and ritual complex found to be overlain by a Romano-British temple.

Work on the site, and another a few miles to the north, became known as the Vale and Ridgeway Project and provided new insights into life through later prehistoric and Romano-British periods.

The undergraduate certificate led her to do first a Masters and then a DPhil, awarded in 2011.

Dr Cumber was a founding member of the Marcham Society and programme secretary of Oxford Architectural and Historical Society.

Her funeral was at All Saints’ Church on February 14.

She is survived by husband William, son William John Cumber, daughters Sophie Elizabeth Cumber and Ellen May Wainright-Lee, and her mother Stella Lampitt.