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
The house was designed in 1922 by Harold Porter for Dr Edward Thomas Mellor who, in 1917, was a geologist with the Transvaal and Witwatersrand Geological Surveys. He published the definitive geological map of the Witwatersrand and became consulting geologist to the Rand Mines Group. Later owners include William Mc Ewan, a judge of the High Court and Joylon Nuttall of The Star.