In 1888 R. D. Oldham, the seismologist best known for first quantifying the diameter of the Earth’s core using seismic waves, provided a description of the surface rupture of an active fault at the southeast end of the Kashmir Valley. Intriguingly, he described it as a normal fault parallel to the strike of the trend of the Himalaya, with 2 m of slip that had impounded several sag ponds. He provided no map of its location, and the fault is not shown on recent maps, nor is it described by later authors. In September 2011 we retraced his footsteps and found the fault. Charcoal fragments embedded in layered sediments within a prominent sag pond indicate that slip of ≈1 m most probably occurred around ≈700 B.C., with a second event with similar slip in 680±100 A.D. Although the fault is most probably a sackung, its association with fault gouge and slickensides, its strike orthogonal to a north–south ridge, and its relationship to a series of similar east‐northeast‐striking faults spaced at ≈5 km intervals in a north‐northwest alignment, suggests that slip may in part be related to flexural stresses in southeast Kashmir. Richard Dixon Oldham joined the Geological Survey of India at the age of 21 in the last few days of 1879, a year after the death of his father, Thomas Oldham, its founder. Within months of arrival he contracted malaria and was sent to the Himalaya to convalesce where he completed three of his father’s manuscripts including a catalog of Indian earthquakes (Oldham, 1882). He was destined to spend several years in the Himalaya investigating its stratigraphy and structure. In 1881, while mapping the local geology between Sirmaur and Nahan (30°55′N, 77°59′E) he identified, for the first time in India, an active fault cutting the Earth’s surface (Medlicott, 1882; p. 6). …