THIS compact and bijou Old Town des res is built in a style popular some years ago.

It has no central heating but benefits from a large open fire in the middle of the open plan living space.

That space is ideal for a growing family, not to mention one or two prized farm animals if the weather is especially cold or there are wolves nearby.

Unfortunately, there is no indoor plumbing and no glass in the windows, as neither of these refinements has been invented.

Viewing of the property will be possible only when and if some clever person manages to invent a time machine capable of carrying passengers back a dozen centuries or so...

The main image on this page is taken from a book called Off the Map of History. It was published in 1989 by Thamesdown Borough Council, which would itself become history eight years later.

Written by CJ Chandler, HSN Digby and LJ Marshman, it chronicles life in north east Wiltshire from prehistory to 1600, and makes a nonsense of any suggestion that the Swindon area’s history only really began with the arrival of the railway.

The first chapter, Prehistoric Archaeology of the Swindon Area, mentions Neolithic barrows and evidence of the arrival from the Continent of the mysterious Beaker people in the 400 years after about 2200BC.

“The culture of these immigrants,” says the text, “is named after the characteristic drinking cup or ‘Beaker’ that they placed in graves with their dead.

“Okus Quarry in Swindon has yielded four inhumation burials all with accompanying beakers: a female aged about 23, a child of 12 or so, an infant of approximately 15 months and an unspecified inhumation accompanied by a hammerstone and flint flakes.”

Later chapters list a wealth of local sites, including the Iron Age hill forts of Barbury Castle, Liddington Castle and Castle Hill in Blunsdon St Andrew.

Also detailed are Roman sites including a hotel at Wanborough and what may have been a military base whose remains lie beneath what is now Covingham.

There is a photograph of one of several Roman wells discovered during a spate of building work in Old Town in the 1960s and 1970s.

Excavations in Old Town, say the authors, indicate a Saxon settlement there as early as 600, which became the farming and market community listed in the Domesday Book centuries later.