As several readers may know, my day job is looking after Chedworth Roman Villa in the Cotswolds. Chedworth sits comfortably within a region that supported some of the most prosperous rural estates in Britannia. Yet the world that sustained and shaped the villa extended far beyond the Coln valley.
BOOK REVIEWS
Stephen Coan’s The Buried Man can only be described as magisterial. It is the culmination of decades of patient, methodical, and deeply informed scholarship. Coan has lived with, traced, and tracked H. Rider Haggard for much of his adult life, and this monumental volume represents the distillation of that long engagement. It is unlikely to be surpassed for a very long time.
BLUE PLAQUES
This strikingly beautiful beacon replaces an 1850s stone cairn farm beacon and incorporates the 1928 round drum of the trig beacon, common throughout South Africa. The centre island of Oxford Road originated from a water divide chosen for a farm boundary, which also served as a fire break and horse and wagon track; later this line defined the roadway and the Gautrain tunnel.