Peter Tolhurst

This is a great dip in/dip out book. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this when I started reading it straight through. It put me to sleep a couple times because there’s no through argument. There’s are eye-catching chapters like The Evil Eye and Protective Magic, but it’s really worth dipping in to the less promising looking ones. There’s one on towers which I really didn’t expect much from but he says:

‘A belief was that round towers were once antediluvian wells and that the surrounding soil had, over time, been worn away leaving them exposed. These flint structures were, as they story goes, later transformed into round towered churches by the addition of nave and chancel.’

Interesting enough, but he illustrates this with a photo of a well shaft sticking up out of the beach at Covehythe where the entire village has fallen into the sea. Just astonishing.

The whole book is particularly well illustrated. It’s big, almost coffee table sized with inline illustrations and huge inner margins sometimes with pictures running vertically.

Some of his sentences are confused and you’ll need to read them twice to work out what he means. It’s the kind of thing an editor would have caught if it weren’t self published, but no publisher would have spent as much money on production.

Two stars is unfair and would have been higher if I had managed to read it as intended.… (mais)