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
In the early 1900’s the three daughters of Sytze Wierda (Government engineer and architect of the Transvaal Republic) lived in this area and formed the core of residents who built this church on land donated by the Obermeyer family. Obermeyer, Wierda’s son-in-law, was responsible for the wood work.