I liked his humour. This is the last squire of Erddig in the 1960s:

Philip Yorke could be found camping in his own freezing room, the walls subsiding into coal workings, rain pouring onto the state bed, wallpaper peeling and calor gas bills piling up. He struggled to make a living as a prep schoolmaster, security guard and tour operator with his own minibus.

And then Jenkins’s own blessing. ‘Still nothing was touched’. There are other such moments, as when he writes about Plas Teg near Mold, now being saved from dereliction by an eccentric antique dealer: ‘One room is devoted entirely to live parrots, who appear to be eating it.’ I liked the odd breezy ‘This is a big, jolly church’.

For here they come, the limewashed walls and the lovely pale oak. Reading this book, you will be struck by how tolerant Welsh parishoners were of their old churches and how reluctant to admit Victorian modernisers; small churches in groves, on mountains, at the end of lanes down which Jenkins came, notebook in hand, muttering to himself.

But there is a reason for this, for the churches, that is. They are untouched because the only guarantor of good taste is poverty, and there were few church congregations in Nonconformist Wales. The attentions of Christian architects were elsewhere — on chapels Gothic, chapels Byzantine, chapels Doric, chapels Corinthian, chapels Romanesque, chapels Doric and Corinthian and Romanesque. Jenkins is kind about Welsh chapels, which are the ugliest buildings known to man:

The Trellwyn Methodists have built a church.

The front looks like an abbey,

But thinking they could fool the Lord,

They’ve kept the back part shabby.

Yet chapels are the most prominent public buildings in Wales; you see them bleakly everywhere, so that it is a shock to see them so ignored here, little more than half a dozen in this book. But then Jenkins probably couldn’t get in. I know of no chapel which is unlocked, and none I would want to see inside, having experienced as a boy the bright gloom of those clear windows and the varnished pine. And now, built, rebuilt, extended, sometimes over just half a century, they are closing at the rate of one a week. On the whole I think it better that they have been ignored. For it meant I could enjoy this book.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP