The Net of History

Tennis Court below the House as in A Room With a View

WEYMOUTH, DORSET, ENGLAND
In Weymouth (south coast of England in Dorset county) this weekend we looked out of the parlor windows of Victorian house where we were staying onto the lower yard, a flat, rectangular, green lawn.  Our host informed us that it used to be a tennis court.  Later on a tour of the gardens she showed us the cast-iron-handled roller used to roll the lawn to make it firm and flat for tennis games.

Recently we watched A Room With a View, the E. M. Forester story that is laid in Florence and back in Edwardian England at the home of a reasonably wealthy country family.  One of the scenes takes place in the back yard where the grown children are playing lawn tennis.  The layout of the house and tennis court and rear stone deck are very similar to this Weymouth house.

Weymouth's patron - KG III

We frequently find the history of long ago close at hand.  Some examples from this weekend:

• King Geoge III (of “an absolute Tyranny over these States” fame in the Declaration of Independence) made 14 extended visits to Weymouth between 1789 and 1801. We witnessed his patronage of the town in the naming of nearly every building and street and the town’s grateful appreciation to him commemorated with a statue.
• In downtown Dorchester (6 miles away) is the Roman wall and a stately six-room house from 100 AD. The floors in each room are radiantly heated and decorated in colorful, patterned mosaics.

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• Roman mosaic floors

• Nearby is a Neolithic earth henge from 2500BC with banked earth and standing stones.  More recently Romans used it as an amphitheater and in the 21^st century it is an outdoor summer concert venue.

Back at “our” house in Weymouth we explored the basement.  Bending slightly to avoid the beams we stepped over a threshold into a long, narrow room with packed-dirt-floor under the front of the house.  In it lay a coal shovel.  A final door with cast hardware leads to a room with a coal shoot leading up to the driveway.  The floor is covered a foot deep with shiny coal chunks…no longer needed in the fire places in each room of the house.  Finally we explored the detached garage.  The stalls where two horses were kept now house the power lawn mower and plastic yard waste containers.   Potted plant containers are propped in the horses’ hay feeder rack.  Up a narrow ladder stairs is the where the groom lived.  The gabled window in his small room looks down on the grass tennis court.


Peter