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Calleva has always drawn visitors to the site to look or to study. King John visited in
May 1215, a month before he signed the Magna Carta, and many historians, artists and surveyors
have recorded their impressions of the town and its significance.
John Stair, who was at one time a cobbler and then an innkeeper at Aldermaston, studied
Calleva for many years in the eighteenth century and made a plan of
his discoveries. He noticed
that the growth of crops was stunted over the Roman streets and
houses and traced the
street system. He excavated a number of the buildings and understood that there were
earlier houses below those nearest the surface. "These things inclin'd him to imagine
that probably here might have been anciently an old British Town, & that the Romans
rebuilt this City upon the remains & foundations of it".
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Revd J.G. Joyce, rector of Stratfield Saye, excavated here from 1864 to 1878, with
the consent and encouragement of the landowner, the second Duke of Wellington. Joyce
recorded his work in great detail in his three volume Journal. This was acquired by
Reading Museum in 1934 after it appeared in an auction of his son's effects in Winchester.
The handwritten entries, illustrated by exquisite watercolour drawings, bring
his work before us in great detail. His grasp of scientific technique was well ahead
of his time.
In 1876, two years before his death, he acted as host to Charles
Darwin's sons, who stayed at the Rectory and studied the excavations, collecting
information for their father's work on earth worms. When it was published in 1881
(after Joyce's death) it contained some woodcuts from his section drawings.
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