Reviews: Local History Magazine, the Chad and the ‘Five Leaves Diary’

A review of Roman Nottinghamshire has appeared in the May/June 2011 edition of Local History Magazine:

An article about the book also appeared in Nottinghamshire’s weekly Chad newspaper as part of Bill Purdue’s regular books column. The text is reproduced below (the original article has colour pictures!):

Bill’s local book of the month
FOR many people the history of Nottinghamshire
goes back as far as the days of Robin Hood, but as Mark Patterson found out when he began research for his book Roman Nottinghamshire, published last year, our local history goes back much further than that.
Whilst our county was not the site of famous battles during Roman times, there is still much to discover about Roman
activity in the area.
Though there is only one visible sign of Roman occupation left in the county – which Mr Patterson calls “a bump in a farmer’s field next to the A46 Leicester to Lincoln road, the remains of several Roman villas have been discovered down the years, as well as forts, towns and even a bridge across the River Trent.
Some of the most notable villas are at Southwell, at Margidunum which was a “sprawling Roman town” near East Bridgford and at Mansfield Woodhouse.
The villa near Woodhouse was discovered
at the end of the 18th Century and included an intricate mosaic floor.
A small building was erected over the mosaic to protect it from the elements, but, by the early 19th Century, the floor had been vandalised and destroyed and the walls written over.
Fortunately a copy of the mosaic had been made and this is reproduced in the book.
Now nothing is visible above ground, but a model showing what the Mansfield Woodhouse villa would have looked like is in Mansfield Museum.
Mark Patterson is a freelance journalist
and is keen to emphasise that he is not an archaeologist, but his interest in the Roman period stems from the fact that he was born in County Durham and made many trips to Hadrian’s Wall during his childhood.
Roman Nottinghamshire is a very informative and entertaining read. It is published by Five Leaves Publications at £11.99 and can be obtained online at www.nottinghambooks.co.uk or www.fiveleaves.
co.uk .
You can also find out more about the book at http://romannottinghamshire.wordpress.com

Finally, Roman Nottinghamshire gets another few mentions in Nottingham’s LeftLion magazine thanks to Pippa Hennessy, who, when not studying for a BA degree in creative and professional writing at Nottingham University, works as a marketeer for the book’s publisher Five Leaves Publications (not Five Leaf, as Local History Magazine would have it). Pippa’s ‘Five Leaves Diary’ can be read in full at:   http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/the-five-leaves-diary/id/3864

 

Review in Nottingham Post

A review of Roman Nottinghamshire was printed in the Nottingham Post newspaper on August 9, 2011. The review is the same as was printed in Nottinghamshire Today (see previous posts).

LeftLion: interview

Those nice people at Nottingham’s free LeftLion magazine have published an interview about Roman Nottinghamshire in the Aug/Sep 2011 issue. The photograph, by the way, shows the author on Broxtowe Estate – a background chosen because of the Roman fort that was found under the estate in the 1930s. The article, by James Walker, is reproduced in two parts below and is now also online on the LeftLion website: http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/mark-patterson/id/3818

Southwell villa: the Irish connection

Remnants of painted Roman plaster immediately after their removal from the Southwell villa's cold bath during the original excavation in 1959. Photograph is copyright of the University of Nottingham Museum.

An update on the on-going saga regarding plans to build houses on top of the large Roman villa at Southwell has been published in the Newark Advertiser today. The report’s key news actually lies in the final paragraph: that the developer, Caunton Properties, intends to sell the land in question to an ‘Irish syndicate’ regardless of the outcome of Newark and Sherwood District Council’s decision on the planning application this year. The full news report can be read at: http://www.newarkadvertiser.co.uk/articles/news/Once-in-a-lifetime-chance-for-heritage

Review in Nottinghamshire Today

A positive review of Roman Nottinghamshire has been published in the August 2011 edition of Nottinghamshire Today. The magazine’s content is not on-line.

Return to Thurgarton please

Figure recovered from the Epperstone villa, now in the University of Nottingham Museum

A former lecturer of mine at Nottingham Trent University’s Brackenhurst college near Southwell has been doing research into old field patterns and boundaries in the fields on and around the campus. His work had led him, in part, to material written by the late Philip Lyth, former Brackenhurst principal and author of A History of Nottinghamshire Farming (1989), whose research into how Southwell’s Anglo Saxon boundaries offered clues to the area’s long obscured Roman roads features prominently in Roman Nottinghamshire (see page 170). In brief, Lyth thought that some of the boundaries preserved certain Roman routes including a road from Ad Pontem on the Trent to the hill-top fort at Osmanthorpe, and a track from the villas near Thurgarton to Southwell. My former lecturer told me he thought that one of the old Roman tracks had been found on Brackenhurst’s land. And, he asked, had I seen the website about Thurgarton? I hadn’t, but when I did I had one of those ‘really-wish-I’d-seen-this-before’ moments since the Roman page on the Thurgarton village website http://www.thurgartonhistory.co.uk/2011/03/roman-thurgarton/ presents hitherto little seen information – and photographs – that I could have done knowing about when writing the section on Thurgarton in the villa chapter of Roman Nottinghamshire. On Ordnance Survey map Explorer 260 the site of a Roman building is located near Thurgarton Beck, about mid-way between Thurgarton and Epperstone villages. It is an unassuming but quietly lovely place to walk to in good weather, far from any main roads and with the beck gurgling away nicely in the background. And when you consider that the area’s thick red clay soils were farmed by Romano-Britons over 1600 years ago, the landscape view becomes imbued with an additional depth of meaning. Encouraging people to get out to see places like this was one reason for writing the book.

Thurgarton beck near the Thurgarton villa site. The objects in the beck are the remains of an old sheepwash

In fact, there were at least two neighbouring Roman buildings here – one being a corridor-type villa with a hypocaust central heating system, the other also a high status building with painted plasterwork, hypocaust, bath suite and evidence of various alterations and extensions. The buildings were excavated in the 1950s and 60s, the first being dubbed the ‘the Thurgarton villa’ because it is in Thurgarton parish while the other is called ‘the Epperstone villa’ because it falls within the boundaries of Epperstone parish. The problem in writing about these was that the published excavation reports were scrappy, consisting only of brief notes in contemporaneous copies of the East Midlands Archaeological Bulletin. I always thought I’d missed a book or journal I should have known about. But, upon reading the Thurgarton website, it seems I didn’t miss anything in print: website author Ellis Morgan confirms that no formal excavation reports were published and that exacavation diaries, notes and photographs have in fact been kept at Boots Archives. The Thurgarton website’s other news is that a third villa may have been located 500m to the north of the Epperstone villa. There is also an old aerial photograph which purports to show a Roman road and minor track in the area. This isn’t the first time that additional material has come to light since Roman Nottinghamshire was published. In the past few weeks alone I’ve met people who’ve had personal involvement with excavations at Margidunum, Segelocum and Norton Disney. Derrick Riley, the pioneering air photographer who discovered several important sites in Nottinghamshire, was a name on paper only until a woman in the audience at a recent talk casually told me later that she had know Derrick very well and that he’d entrusted a pile of his notes to her. All of these stories will be followed up. Whether they appear here or in a possible second edition of the book is undecided. At present, I favour both.

Looking down onto the site of the Thurgarton villa, near the coppice to the right

Roman talk in Southwell

hoardings around the villa site in Southwell

Author Mark Patterson will be giving an illustrated talk on Roman Nottinghamshire at Southwell Library on September 22, 2011. The event starts at 7pm. Tickets cost £3.00 and can purchased from the library, in King Street, NG24 0EH, by ringing 01636 812148 or by emailing southwell.library@nottscc.gov.uk. Meanwhile, the book Roman Nottinghamshire has been selling so well that it is now into its second print run.