Author: Martin Rose
Designed & Typeset by: Simon Rendall
Published Date: 2024
Publisher: The Cygnet Press
ISBN: 978-0-907435-23-5
Length: 436 pages
Price: £25.00
Available From: Harts Bookshop, the Tourist Information Centre, Jonathan Sandoe in London, Amazon or from the author at martin.rose@magd.oxon.org (will deliver locally)
Description
Henry Winstanley, the Saffron Walden engineer, engraver, lighthouse-builder and theatrical entrepreneur built the great lighthouse on the Eddystone reef fourteen miles off Plymouth. It was a triumph of marine engineering, dressed in the flamboyant architecture of an age already passing. It survived only six years before being torn, with its architect, off the reef by the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703. Most of what he did and made was spectacular but impermanent – with the exception of fifty or so surviving etchings, mostly of the Earl of Suffolk’s great house at Audley End, later a palace for Charles II, of the heyday of which they form the only, and splendid, record.
The Author.
Martin Rose read History at Magdalen, and Oriental Studies at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. He served in the British Council for thirty years in Baghdad, Rome, Brussells, London, Ottawa and Rabat. He has now retired to a small village outside Saffron Walden, a couple of miles from Henry Winstanley’s Littlebury home.
Book review first appeared in Saffron Walden Historical Journal No 48: Autumn 2024