Rodney Castleden
Rodney Castleden was born in 1945 in Worthing in Sussex, the son of a detective who was a crime-scene investigator. After a grammar school education in Chichester and a Geography degree at Oxford, Rodney trained as a teacher and taught Geography, Geology and English in secondary schools in the Midlands, London and Sussex. He now lives at Seaford on the Sussex coast. For a long time he was Head of the Geography Department and the Humanities Faculty at Roedean School, but he is now a full-time writer.
A profound interest in landscape evolution led him to research river floods and valley development for seven years in the English Midlands - and for this he was awarded a Master of Science degree at Oxford. During the fieldwork for this project he found he was able to use archaeological evidence to date ancient river deposits; this intensified his interest in prehistory, and prepared the way for a series of books about archaeology.
He is a firm believer in undertaking fresh and original research wherever it looks as though it might be useful. His field surveys on the Cerne Giant won a British Archaeological Award in 1996. His enthusiasms are many, and they include landscape, ancient hill figures, the British neolithic, the Aegean bronze age, crime and treatments of time and history.
For sixteen years he was co-editor of the Geographical Association’s Classic Landforms series, a highly successful venture to supply students and teachers with up-to-date explanations of landscape. He has published over 40 books and 100 articles.
His interests range widely across the arts and sciences, and he wrote both text and music for Winfrith, a music drama performed to celebrate the Millennium in Northamptonshire in 2000. He is currently working on The Apple of Discord, the reconstruction of a long-lost ancient Greek epic poem, the prequel to the Iliad.