James Wynn

James left Warwick University in 1974 with a degree in English and American Literature and began a career as an actor working in regional theatre companies including, Hull Truck Theatre Company and the Victoria Theatre in Stoke on Trent. He starred as "Sooty" Sutcliffe, the English and Drama teacher in Grange Hill, which was to become TV's longest running children's soap. His other work included an appearance as one of the slower runners in Chariots of Fire and a part in Give My Regards to Broad Street where he shared a dressing room with George Martin, the Beatles Producer.

After joining the BBC in 1983 he gained a place on their Film Directors' Course and went on to work on a range of programmes including Jim'll Fix It, Comic Relief, Noel Edmonds and Songs of Praise. In the Independent sector he directed documentary programmes for Granada, STV and TVS. In 1991 he set up CVP Communications to make films and videos for the charity sector and has since directed and produced work for a range of major charities and international relief organisations, shooting in Mexico, India and Ethiopia.

In 1997 he and his wife Anna left London with their two daughters aged 4 and 2. Armed with the money from the sale of their two bed-roomed terrace house and a desire for more space, they bought Saltford Manor and stepped into a much bigger story.

This is a book about a family and the house they bought some ten years ago: Saltford Manor, the oldest inhabited house in the country.

For James Wynn it was love at first sight as soon as the estate agent ushered him into the tumbledown wreck that Saltford had become and, like many a lover, he became obsessed with his beloved's past. And so, as he set about restoring the building, he embarked upon a quest to learn everything he could he could about the men and women who had built and shaped Saltford over a period of nearly a thousand years.

The stars of his story are not history's leading actors - although William the Conqueror makes a fleeting appearance, Judge Jeffries drops in for the night and Brunel builds a tunnel in the back garden - but its bit-players and extras. They did not leave monuments or found dynasties, but they did leave their marks upon the fabric of Saltford in the form of the oldest domestic wall paintings in Britain, a miraculous medieval window worthy of a cathedral, the entwined initials of a husband and wife on a carved fireplace dating from the English Civil War and, above all, that indefinable 'something' in the feel of the place that makes a house into a home.

As we follow the author in his investigation of Saltford's previous owners he takes us freewheeling through more than nine centuries of English history meeting the ordinary men and women of rural Somerset whose lives he painstakingly and lovingly reconstructs in this enchanting book.

This story of the author's love affair with the tumbledown manor house he bought in the 1990's is an investigation of a house and those who lived in it over nearly a thousand years that reads like a detective story. It is a re-creation of the lives of successive generation of common people whose lives find no place in the history books.