'I could not believe I had found buried treasure in a Surrey field' A man says he thought someone was playing a trick on him when he struck gold in a Surrey field.

The BBC's obsession with promoting metal-detecting continues, still without acknowledgement of its many problematic aspects...

Great to be there - the O2 is quite a big room 😊

Part of a Cadbury egg with chocolate buttons inside

Coin hoard in vessel (damaged during excavation) #FindsFriday

BBC Sounds - City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran by Ramita Navai - Available Episodes Listen to the latest episodes of City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran by Ramita Navai on BBC Sounds.

All these stories of life and transgression in Tehran are amazing

Cutting from the Hampshire Telegraph and Post, Friday, Apr 16, 1926, with a photo captioned 'Garden showing the Roman paving, beneath which the remains were discovered' and text that begins: "DISCOVERY OF ROMAN REMAINS. Portion of Villa and Mosaic Paving Beneath Havant Garden. Some time ago Mr. Walter Owen Adames, a commercial traveller, of Spes Bona, Langstone Avenue, Havant, was digging around in his garden for the purpose of planting perennials, when he had the good fortune to come across a quantity of broken Roman pottery. The finding of this accounted most probably for his inability to grow trees in the garden, and it induced him to explore further. As a result he unearthed an old foundation wall two feet thick (similar to one which was discovered only last Saturday), a stone floor composed of fine Roman cement, and a very interesting drain made of perfectly preserved red tile. The drain, which was broken up by what was probably the hypocaust for heating the water, led to a Roman bath, the floor of which is in an almost perfect state of preservation..."

#OTD 100 years ago the Hampshire Telegraph reported the discovery of a #Roman villa (with baths) in a garden in Havant. 'Spes bona' indeed, unless you were trying to plant an orchard, as the homeowner was. Instead, he ended up creating something rather like the Blue Peter Italian sunken garden… 🏺

Photo of Owen Adames and his daughters working in the apsidal-ended heated bath, with numerous tile stacks visible (Gilkes 1998, fig 5)

This and more on the chequered history of work at the site in Oliver Gilkes' report (Hampshire Studies 1998): it's summarised as "a sequence of Roman buildings including a small bath suite" - so not necessarily a villa and no intact mosaics (just stray tesserae), but that's press headlines for you!

However, concern was expressed by local amateur archaeologist AJ Gedge, who had initially encouraged Adames but later wrote that it was "truly harrowing to see beautiful tiles reduced to part and destruction to construct an indescribably vulgar rockery, and provide boulders for the house…"

A better reproduction and more accurately captioned version of the newspaper photo, showing the 'Romanised' Garden with the tiled plunge-bath patio in the foreground (Gilkes 1998, fig. 3)

The paper reports that "Up to the present little interest has been shown by archaeological experts in the discoveries"; in other words no-one had stopped Mr Adames using "hundreds of pieces of vari-coloured cement work, petrified with age… to form picturesque rockeries in his garden."

Cutting from the Hampshire Telegraph and Post, Friday, Apr 16, 1926, with a photo captioned 'Garden showing the Roman paving, beneath which the remains were discovered' and text that begins: "DISCOVERY OF ROMAN REMAINS. Portion of Villa and Mosaic Paving Beneath Havant Garden. Some time ago Mr. Walter Owen Adames, a commercial traveller, of Spes Bona, Langstone Avenue, Havant, was digging around in his garden for the purpose of planting perennials, when he had the good fortune to come across a quantity of broken Roman pottery. The finding of this accounted most probably for his inability to grow trees in the garden, and it induced him to explore further. As a result he unearthed an old foundation wall two feet thick (similar to one which was discovered only last Saturday), a stone floor composed of fine Roman cement, and a very interesting drain made of perfectly preserved red tile. The drain, which was broken up by what was probably the hypocaust for heating the water, led to a Roman bath, the floor of which is in an almost perfect state of preservation..."

#OTD 100 years ago the Hampshire Telegraph reported the discovery of a #Roman villa (with baths) in a garden in Havant. 'Spes bona' indeed, unless you were trying to plant an orchard, as the homeowner was. Instead, he ended up creating something rather like the Blue Peter Italian sunken garden… 🏺

"A wintry impression of Anstiebury Camp" by Donald Maxwell #HillfortsWednesday

The museum aims to "make history accessible for everyone at no cost barrier" - a shame that so many detectorists don’t follow that philosophy…

Pen-and-ink sketch looking over a large field to buildings in the middle distance, captioned ‘Coldharbour Farm, near Bletchingley’ (no sign of the bull)

“I was accosted… with a notice which bore the alarming legend ‘Beware of the Bull’… then again, I was painting in water-colour… All scenes between bulls and artists are based on the assumption the artist will paint in oils so that while he is running… the bull can impale the canvas upon his horns.”

Coloured drawing of a three-storey building at night, with a larger ruined structure behind, captioned ‘London, too, has its Ruins of Other Days’

“I turned a corner and beheld the Coliseum, generally thought to be in Rome. London, too, has its ruins of other days, and in the light of the moon the arches of the burnt-out Hop Exchange had become very imposing.”

Water-colour view of ‘A watermill at Guildford’

“All the line sketches I have made rapidly and on the spot. I do not think I have sat down to any of them. The colour notes too have been arrived at in much the same way… It is a story of quick travelling. He who runs may sketch.”

Photo of three books: Unknown Surrey (1924), The New Lights O’ London (1926) and A Detective in Surrey (1932)

Water-colour of a landscape captioned ‘From the Hogs' Back looking south west’

Donald Maxwell, illustrator, writer, war artist & ley hunter (more on that anon), was born #OTD in 1877. Of the numerous travel & topographic books of the earlier C20, his stand out to me for the impressionistic, snapshot quality of the sketches and paintings. A few examples from Surrey and London…

‘Part of our souls’: the fight to stop the New Forest being split in two As government reorganisation ties part of the forest to Southampton, local people are angry

“…hating the idea of city-focused politicians having a say over their rural lives” - I feel like Raymond Williams would have had something to say…

For goodness sake can we have fewer poor people in our museums and gardens. This is the burning issue that keeps me awake at night and I am glad Robert Jenrick is tackling it.

The spine of 'Abbot's Exposition of Jonah'

With the story being told around the neighbourhood some gentlemen offered to sponsor young George, and eventually he went up to Balliol and on to great success in the university and the church. But perhaps he kept an interest in a fishy tale, since he preached over 250 sermons on… the book of Jonah.

And all because of a fish from the river Wey…

The story goes that his pregnant mother had a dream in which she was told that if she ate a pike her son would arise to great preferment. Soon afterwards, in taking a pail of water from the river she found she'd caught a pike, which, of course, she ate…

Because well-being is linked to place and heritage, not just nature

Watercolour by A.L. Collins of an open landscape under fair weather clouds, with a stand of trees to one side, captioned 'From the Ridgeway above Wantage'; this image faces the page from which the quote is taken.

"... save the wind, the rain, the streaming road, and the vigorous limbs and glowing brain and what they created.“

"… and to our defiance, just as did the cowering of birds, of bowed trees, of whole woods, under the wild, shadowy swoop of the mist and rain and the valleys below us humbled, their broad fields, their upthrust churches and clustered villages overwhelmed and blotted out and everything annihilated…

"… and the neighbouring sky exalt us. Even the sight of these tender-blubbering petals ruined in the drenched grass was pleasant. We should have liked better to see them unspoiled and wide in the sun; but we did not wish them to be so and their distress did but add to the glory of the storm…

“… and in the dark, wet copses there were thousands of primroses. All day the wind, and often rain and wind together, roared in the trees. The pale flowers were soaked and frayed and speckled with dust from the trees and they hung down or were broken from their soft stalks. But the high land…

Cover of the first edn of The Icknield Way (1913), in green with gold lettering and an image of a road snaking through an open landscape

Edward Thomas was killed at Arras on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917. Here he is writing about a wet day from an earlier spring, in 'The Icknield Way'. He's in England, but I think there's a Welsh cadence about this prose, like Dylan Thomas:

"It has been, let us say, a day that should be spring…

"…much of which will, no doubt, make the antiquaries rub their eyes. Mr Watkins runs the risk of being told that if you draw a line on a map from any given point you will, in due course, come to one of his landmarks in any given direction. That risk, however, does not deter him…"

Cutting from the Western Daily Press, Wed April 7, 1926: "MARK STONES. Book on Prehistoric Trackways. ‘The Old Straight Track’ is the title of a new volume by Mr Alfred Watkins. It deals with mounds, old stones, moats, hill-notches, and so on, and essays the task of showing them to be sighting points on prehistoric straight trackways that often provided after-sites for camps, churches, or castles. Mr Watkins has dealt with the subject in previous publications, and has thereby aroused a considerable amount of controversy. In and Around Bristol. In this new volume he has added a large amount of detail, much of which will, no doubt, make the antiquaries rub their eyes. Mr Watkins runs the risk of being told that if you draw a line or a map from any given point you will, in due course, come to one of his landmarks in any given direction. That risk, however, does not deter him from going on, first in one direction, and then in another, picking up stray bits of local lore beside every path he takes..."

These books bring to mind a previous wave of discovery of rural heritage 100 years ago, coinciding with affordable motor cars and the ley-hunting craze. Here's a rather sceptical review of The Old Straight Track in the Western Daily Press #OTD in 1926: the new volume has "a large amount of detail…

Another in the plethora of books (re)discovering well-known ancient (or at least oldish) places - is this is a post-lockdown phenomenon? Anyway, nothing new here except the wonderful Andy Partridge quote about how his local landscape "marked me like an Avebury stone or the ripples across a hillfort"

Blue and white bluebells in a scrubby area in front of a bank, with low sun behind

And whitebells in Woking (I guess these aren’t natives)

Thursday before Easter (Maundy Thursday) is also a holiday in Colombia and elsewhere