Heritage Now

HERITAGE NOW (01/2021) AUTUMN 2021   25 BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS Scourfield for Pembrokeshire and subsequently Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion, and Richard Haslam and Adam Voelcker for Gwynedd. Col- laboration is a generous way of doing things, with information shared, even if necessarily the parish-by-parish fieldwork is not. Also the Welsh books were new, Pevsner had not looked at Caernarfon, Aberystwyth or Kidwelly, and there was a Welsh dimension in the architecture that we were anxious to highlight. It all felt fresh, de- spite Welsh historiography having such deep and ancient roots. Somerset re-introduced me to the bedrock histories of English counties, the Victo- ria County History , and the county archaeological society, which, in Somerset, was founded in 1849. Pevsner’s South Somerset volume was the oldest then unrevised, over 50 years old when I started, and quite slim, so I was given generous space to expand it, two-and-a-half times the word count, whereas with the Wiltshire volume I was only allowed to inflate the word count by a multiple of one and a half. The biggest differences I noted when I start- ed in Wiltshire were the survival of old landed estates and the impact of new money, seemingly contradictory, but nonetheless there. Old estates mean agents and useful archives, patterns of building that can be followed across several par- ishes. New money means previously run-down country houses, often divided or in institutional use, returned at great expense to single family use, also new country houses, mostly in tradi- tional styles. Such houses are frequently more difficult to look at, what with electronic gates and absentee owners. This is not a Wiltshire phenomenon but one that grows stronger the closer to London one is. Bridget Cherry’s 1975 revision was only 12 years after Nikolaus Pevsner’s first edition, it has taken 46 years to get to this edition. What information has become available since 1975 that warrants a new study? Wiltshire had had a partial revision by Bridget Cherry in 1975, that had included the corrections sent in since 1963 and notable new buildings, but had not involved revisiting every town and village. The resurvey of listed buildings happened a few years later, adding greatly to the knowledge of what was there in the county. The surveys of the Wiltshire Buildings Record have made enormous discoveries in looking at vernacular buildings, and tree-ring dating has given precise dates to many of the major medieval and early-modern build- ings. It is often said that Pevsner was preoccupied with the big buildings, most notably the parish church and the gentry house. What were the most RIGHT: The Buildings of England series incorporates the best in contemporary design such as Oare House, a pavilion by IM Pei for Sir Henry and Lady Keswick. BELOW: Great Chalfield Manor. Dendrochronology dates the roof to between 1463 and 1468. ABOVE: Abbey Mill, Bradford-on-Avon, 1875, by Richard Gane, is a bold structure in the wake of the industry’s steep decline.