144 Pages | b&w illustrations

210x148mm, Hardback

9780857041067

Prolific is the word that applies, to someone with 125 books to his name - mostly about Dorset and in-depth history ranging from the Romans to the Second World War - though Bournemouth born Rodney Legg prefers to call it ‘six feet of books’. That’s the shelf-space they occupy.

It is a life that also has had its own themes. Feral childhood turned to teenage protest. A journalist from the age of 16, he was the founder editor, in 1968, of the magazine that continues as Dorset Life. A love affair with the ghost village of Tyneham secured unprecedented public access to a live-firing range.

For a quarter of a century he wardened Steep Holm island in the Bristol Channel as a nature reserve memorial to his broadcasting friend Kenneth Allsop. With international author John Fowles he published the 300-year-old archaeological notes of 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey.

His pride and joy are his couple of cats. And the appearance of what now totals 62 letters (together with five ‘lives remembered’) in The Times: ‘Enough to fill four pages!’
Legg’s resentment against old attitudes in the National Trust turned into 20 years as a subversive insider who opened Max Gate and Fort Henry in Dorset to an admiring public and secured numerous lasting reforms. During this time, in pauses from the continuous motion of Dorset and Somerset countryside walks, he specialised in finding and researching an esoteric range of antiquities and bric-a-brac. His collection of Celtic heads is destined for the British Museum.

Often in trouble, never afraid to voice a difficult opinion, always crusading for a just cause, this revealing autobiography covers the lows and highs of a figure who – admired or otherwise – has become a much-loved Dorset institution.

Rodney Legg was born in Bournemouth of solid Dorset stock and has emerged as a hugely prolific publisher, author and journalist particularly on country and walking themes and concerning the history of Dorset.

He also edited both Dorset – The Country Magazine and Purbeck and Poole Magazine. Nationally he is still active in the environmental movement having been chairman of the Open Spaces Society since 1989 and a member of the ruling council of the National Trust from 1990 to 2009.