Oxford is my second home. I’m not much of one for cities, and there’s no doubt that’s what Oxford is, but especially now the authorities have banned private motor traffic in the town center, it feels more like a really crowded village than a large manufacturing city. So Thursday was an Oxford day, with a…

There are reasons why England is green.  Most of them fell upon our heads yesterday.  But we were lucky enough that on the longest walk, it waited until we were back in the car before the sky opened. Yesterday was a day for ancient history.  First to the Cotswold weaving museum, with its displays of…

In the seventeenth century, the Plunger family built their manor house down near the Lieux River on the edge of Gloucestershire. It was a lovely spot, meadows going gently down to the reeds on this most English of streams, on the outskirts of the hamlet of Nether Bollocks. And the Plungers were happy, for three…

Sunday was a Roman day.  We drove down the Fosse Way to the ruins of the Romano-British villa at Chedworth, where the villa built by a wealthy Brit fond of the Roman life-style built a home for himself 8 miles from the big Roman city of Corinium (now Cirencester.)  As it was a typical English…

Both of the recent Russell books I’ve worked on, The Language of Bees and The Green Man (which final name is still to be decided…), look at the roots of what we now know as Britain. Thomas Brothers particularly is fascinated by the Norse and Roman roots of British society, and significant place names touch…

Half of us arrived Thursday just after noon, bleary eyed but glad to be back in England. Cars hired, we wheeled onto the motorway (M25 then M40, for those keeping count) and flirted with Oxford by following that city’s ring road for eighty degrees or so before shooting off for the West. I own a…