WHEN Roy Ramsbottom saw this photograph of two young men in army uniform at Oulton Park he was fascinated.

Five years later, on a journey which has taken him through France and Belgium, he has published a book detailing the lives of the Grey- Egertons of Oulton Park.

For these young men are Philip and Rowland Egerton, twin sons of Sir Philip and Lady Grey-Egerton, of Oulton Park.

Just five weeks after this photograph was taken in September 1914, Rowland, on the right, was dead - killed in the First World War.

He was followed in 1918 by his twin Philip who, after suffering mentally and physically, insisted it was his duty to rejoin his Hussars regiment.

But the book is not just about the twins.

The central character is the beautiful vivacious, Mary "Mae" the 19-year-old American girl, who married Sir Philip (known by his friends as Brian). The twins' mother.

She was a young woman whose bewitching charms few men could resist.

"In a crowded room. Mae could make a man feel as if they were quite alone," a female relative once said.

The book is also a tale which takes the reader back to the long gone summers of the decades prior to the First World War.

It sweeps from cottages of Cheshire to Indian palaces, from London ballrooms to the pleasure domes of Californian media moguls.

The pages echo with the tumult of war and the resulting end of the direct line of one of Cheshire's oldest families.

Copies cost £10 and are available from Walton Publications, Darland House, 44 Winnington CW8 1AU.