Boldly for restoration

Wales, by Simon Jenkins

Last year, having been to Scotland, I called on the mother of an old friend. Mrs Molly Jones of Carmarthen, I found to my great surprise, was very enthusiastic about Scotland. It was so unlike Wales, she said. All those castles . . . ‘But Mrs Jones, there are castles at six-mile intervals from where you’re sitting.’ ‘Yes, but they’re so . . . well . . . dilapidated.’

The first delightful thing about this gazeteer to what his publishers describe as ‘the best Welsh buildings’ is that Simon Jenkins is quietly, and sometimes not quietly at all, of her persuasion. This is Jenkins on Caernarfon, the best preserved (having had a 19th-century makeover) of all Welsh castles. ‘Most of the interior of the castle now has the familiar form of “ruins in a lawn”, round which visitors tend to wander in a daze.’ For, bubbling away beneath the cool assembly of facts, a form such a book imposes, is the most terrifying of all heresies: restoration. It is like, or would be like, reading Pelagius on early Christian thought.

Being a fellow-traveller myself, I can only gape at his nerve. Dear God, the man would like to see among the ruins at Caerleon a Roman bath in action. ‘The public should be able to enjoy the ruins of time or be shown what a working Roman bath looked like. I see no good reason for not doing the latter.’ Luckily he does not mention the amphitheatre.

But listen to his reasons for the baths project:

What we are given instead is a 20th-century warehouse with shopping and education paraphernalia erected on top of a heavily restored ruin. Museologists hate rebuilding old buildings but have no compunction in smothering them with their own work.