The parish is irregularly shaped, covering the villages of Hoxne, Cross Street and Heckfield Green, with a 'tongue' extending southwards to take in part of the former RAF Horham airfield.

Frere argued that these "weapons" were coincident with nearby extinct elephant fossils, in strata at the site of what is now known to be a Middle Pleistocene lake formed during the Great Interglacial geological warming period in Europe.

Accordingly, in Britain that entire period is called "Hoxnian," signifying its identification there, based on evidence from undisturbed layers of pollens from plants and trees found at Frere's site in the 1950s (notably by Richard Gilbert West), which established the cycle of warming and cooling and defined the stages of the Great Interglacial.

Subsequent research by the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain team has confirmed the presence of these ancestors of the Neanderthals as occurring towards the terminal, cooling phase of the Interglacial period, which, according to Chris Stringer, "came to an end,...taking with it the lush river valleys, forests and grasslands on which the herds of horses and deer, and their hunters, relied.

Only fourteen years after the last dig by the University of Chicago team, on the same farm, only a few hundred metres south along the road, the Hoxne Hoard was discovered by a metal detectorist on 16 November 1992.