Evesham, Worcestershire

Abbey fragments

My awareness of what’s left of Evesham’s once-great abbey was limited in the past to a few fragments. First, the impressive free-standing bell tower, the work of Abbot Lichfield and completed in about 1530, just a few years before the abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII. This tower is to the right in my photograph. Little else remains apart from the Great Gateway and the Almonry, which now houses a museum that contains, among much else, some fragments of carving from the old abbey buildings. What I’d missed until my visit the other day was this arch, which originally led from the abbey’s cloister (to the left in my photograph) into a passage that led beneath the monks’ dormitory into the chapter house – in other words, it formed the approach to the second most important space in the monastery after the church itself.

This arch is much older than the bell tower, and was probably built in around 1290. There are two tall niches at the bottom, from the top of which the arch springs into a curving form decorated with figures in canopied niches. These figures are discernible although very knocked about and worn. Through the arch the spire of the adjacent church of St Lawrence, one of Evesham’s parish churches, is just visible. The arch must have been magnificent when it was new and protected from the weather. Entrances to monastic and cathedral chapter houses are often beautiful pieces of masonry – think of the one at Wells, up its glorious stone steps, or that at Southwell Minster, with some of the best stone carving of the 14th century. This one must have been impressive too.

Work is currently underway on the cloister site to the left of the arch, with much levelling and earth moving going on; the to the right is a well used public park. One hopes that when the work is done and the various temporary security fences are taken away, we’ll be able to appreciate this bit of medieval masonry again and that, for all its decay, it will have a setting worthy of its quality.

Gloucester

The Golden Minster

Dominating a small patch of green space by St Oswald’s Road in Gloucester is a piece of wall with a story going back more than one thousand years.

In around 900, Æthelflæd, daughter of King Alfred the Great, built a large church, known at first as the New Minster, in Gloucester. It became a shrine when Æthelflæd and her brother Edward led a military expedition into Lincolnshire, which was then occupied by the Vikings, and brought back a number of holy relics. Amongst these were the bones of St Oswald, who had been king of Northumbria, a keen supporter of the spread of Christianity in the North of England, and bringer of St Aidan to his kingdom to preach the Christian faith. Oswald’s saintly life – both his encouragement of Christian missionaries like Aidan and his selfless support of the poor – led people to revere him, and after his death miracles were said to take place at his grave. It was said too that miracles occurred at his shrine in the church at Gloucester, to which so much wealth flowed that it become known as the Golden Minster.

After the Norman conquest the minster became an Augustinian priory (one of several priories and friaries in the city) and the building was extended to provide domestic quarters for the monks, to create accommodation for guests, and to upgrade the church. However, in the 16th century the priory was dissolved by Henry VIII and the church was partially demolished. Part of the building survived as a parish church but by 1656 this had been replaced with another building and soon just this wall was left.

The surviving hotchpotch is not much, just part of one wall of the nave, but even this shows several different phases of the building. The semicircular arches are early medieval; the pointed arches represent the later extension of the priory church to the west, and the walls that infill the spaces beneath the arches date from the period after the dissolution when the building was reduced in size for use as a parish church. It’s a rather sad ruin, in a little visited part of the city, probably mostly just glanced at by motorists as they whiz past on a nearby ring road. A reminder of the ways in which this large city changed over the centuries, from a religious centre to an industrial and trading one, of how much has been lost, but of how many traces of the past remain for those with the time and the eyes to see.

East Wittering, Sussex

 

Surprise

Passing through the Witterings, I was prepared to expect West Wittering to be the interesting one and East Wittering to be the preserve merely of modern houses and shops, hardly worth a glance. But I should know by now that nearly everywhere I go, there’s something to make me pause. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, among the residential streets and get-rich-quick property developments, this popped up: what’s left of East Wittering windmill.

It doesn’t look much on the face of it:  the sails and cap have gone, the rendering that once covered the brickwork has partly peeled away, the stump of the tower mill sits quietly on a piece of private land. But it’s a reminder that once there were mills everywhere, grinding corn to make bread – watermills where there was a river or stream to power them, windmills where the terrain is open enough for the sails to catch the wind and turn. East Wittering is near the sea and the wind, as I soon discovered, can blow strongly there.

It’s not known how old this structure is – probably 18th century. It is known to have been working for most of the 19th century,* until the sails were removed in 1896. Perhaps it soldiered on under another power source (many windmills had oil engines installed), but it seems to have spent much of the 20th century derelict.† Nowadays the flour for our bread is as likely to be imported as to come from local fields. In many countries today, and in Britain in particular, foods such as bread are part of international trade networks and prices will increase as the effects of the war in Ukraine are felt more widely. This old mill is a timely reminder of how much agriculture, industry and trade have changed.§

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* Online sources give 1810 as the date of the first written record of the mill.

† If anyone has further information about the mill’s later history, do please let me know via the ‘comments’ button below.

§ Although Britain imports very little wheat from Uklraine (the UK produces over 80 per cent of the wheat it uses), the war is affecting prices because globally the supply is reduced.

Leiston, Suffolk

Secluded

Back in November 2019, the Resident Wise Woman and I made a trip to Suffolk to visit the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, look at some old buildings, visit Sutton Hoo, and gorge on some very good fish and chips. Orford Castle, which I featured in my previous post, was one place on my itinerary. Quite early on the Sunday, before the poets started reading, we visited Leiston Abbey to wander among its 14th-century ruins and enjoy a little of the seclusion that the medieval canons who lived there must have enjoyed or endured as they followed the regime of prayer, study, and work that was imposed on them by the Premonstratensian rule that they lived by.

The abbey was founded by Ranulf Glanville, justiciar of Henry II, in 1182 but the original site proved impractically swampy. So they moved to the location of the present ruins, taking some of the materials of the original building with them when they built anew. This, together with the austere values of their rule, may account for the fact that the architecture that’s visible on the ground is mostly very plan: round piers, arches with very simple mouldings.† This is the kind of architecture that can be seen in the view from a transept through a chapel to the sanctuary in my photograph above. If there were any more decorative details from the 14th century, they’ve gone, although there’s a littler ornate Gothic ornament in some brickwork from a later repair.

We had the ruins to ourselves on our visit, but the abbey did not feel quite as secluded as I expected because there were people in residence. At the dissolution the building passed to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who built a farmhouse along one side of the nave; some of the monastic buildings were used agriculturally. The house was refronted in the Georgian period and is now the quite substantial home of the Pro Corda music school. As we walked around, peering through arches and working out where we were in terms of the monastic layout, the air resounded with fragments of Brahms from a clarinettist and something mellifluous but unidentifiable† on the violin. An example of what I call ‘accidental music’, that’s to say, music that I encounter by accident, which for its unexpectedness is often some of the most enjoyable of all.

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• On the hand, it is probably also the case that some or more decorative stones were removed after the dissolution. 

† I mean unidentifiable by me – there was nothing wrong with the playing, just a gap in my musical knowledge.

Craswall, Herefordshire

The edge of the world 

On the far western edge of Herefordshire, up in the hills that dominate the border between England and Wales, lie the ruins of Craswall Priory, one of the most remote of English monasteries and the highest above sea level. Not easy to find, the ruins are on private land (which the owners open to the public) and in the Middle of Ages the place would have felt even more remote than it does today. The occupants were members of the Order of Grandmont, also known in France as the Bonshommes. They were highly austere (they were silent, ate very simple food, wore coarse habits, based their rule closely on the Gospels) and described themselves as hermits – not in the sense that they lived alone, but because seclusion from ‘the world’ was very important to them. This lonely place must have suited them.  

The ruins today are fragmentary but fascinating and atmospheric. The rounded walls of the church’s apsidal east end are visible, as are some of the walls of the chapter house and bits of foundation and wall of other monastic buildings. Everything is on a small scale – Grandmontine communities were limited in size. Most of the extant walling looks fragile, with gaps rather than mortar between many of the stones. Grass and other flora is establishing itself in the masonry. Yet there are signs of former splendour. ‘Look! Architecture!’ I cried, as I caught sight of the remains of the chapter house, shown in my photograph. The moulded base of a circular pier (one of two that would have held up a vaulted ceiling) and quite an ornate set of mouldings at the bottom of the chapter house’s doorway were what caught my attention. They look 13th century, which ties in with the priory’s foundation in around 1225. 

As one of only three Grandmontine priories in England, Craswall’s ruling or mother church was in France, where the order was founded. As such it was known as an ‘alien priory’ and English kings, suspicious of the influence of (and even spies from) enemy countries, made several efforts to remove or ‘suppress’ religious houses of this kind. Most alien priories had gone by 1414, but Craswall managed to survive until 1462. The buildings must, then, have been gradually deteriorating for well over 500 years. What is left is fragile indeed, and looks as if it needs some serious conservation work. One hopes that this will be possible – without totally losing the feeling of unkempt remoteness which is one of the things that makes the place so special. 

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There is more on Craswall Priory here.

Long ago I did a post about conservation work at Wigmore Castle, which wonderfully maintains the balance between building and environmental conservation. 

Llanwarne, Herefordshire

 

Floods and fragments

Ruined churches. When I come across one in the countryside I naturally think their ruination has been caused by rural depopulation or population movement. The old church of St John the Baptist at Llanwarne in Herefordshire – a place I was quite unaware of until the other day – was abandoned for another reason. The building, which stands close to a brook, suffered repeated flooding, so in the Victorian period a new church was built on a higher site across the road. The old church still stands, minus its roof, an ornamental and tranquil place in which to contemplate the transience of the works of humankind and the visual qualities of weathered stone.

This building is fragile. Some of the mullions and tracery in the windows seem to be supported by the ironwork that must originally have held panes of glass in place; signs tell us not to climb on the walls. There’s a part of me that likes my ruins unkempt and desolate and productive of the sort of emotions that are summed up in the term ‘Romantic’ and in the useful German word Ruinenlust. That word can be translated as ‘Pleasure of ruins’, which is the title of a fascinating book about ruins by Rose Macaulay. Ruinenlust involves taking pleasure in something that also invokes dread or sadness. The melancholy aspect of ruins like this is obvious enough, but there are delights too – the vistas of trees and sky above and through window openings, the sense of a quiet haven that’s becoming part of nature, the softening effects (so admired by Ruskin) of time on stone.

As you can see from my photographs however, this is not the kind of ruin one sometimes sees slipping rapidly back to nature and surrounded by tall grass and drifts of nettles. It is looked after. The grass is trimmed and the latch on the gate still works. So although I can enjoy the ruin’s fragility, the fluid quality of some of its worn window tracery, the patina of its stonework, I can also appreciate the care and effort of the people who look after buildings like this, cut the grass, thoughtfully provide garden benches, and ensure the structure is stable.

Looking at the church is even more than usual an effort of piecing together the building’s story from a collection of assorted architectural fragments: a nave and arcade of the 13th century; a 14th-century aisle and graceful 14th-century window tracery; a tower of the same century, much the most solid-looking part of the building; a later porch, probably 17th century. Walking around inside an oddity becomes clear. At some point the ground level both inside and outside the building has been raised, so that now some of the window sills are not far from the turf and the capitals of the arcade piers are only a couple of feet from the floor. Why? Is this the effect of accumulated silt from centuries of flooding? One derivation of the name Llanwarne is ‘the church by the swamp’.

The inner doorway of the porch bears fragments of a carved inscription. The difficulty of reading this is demonstrated by the conflicting opinions of a 1931 RCHME survey and Pevsner. Pevsner thinks it’s in Latin. The 1931 account sees in it English words such as ‘[fad]eth – soe doth Man’s. . . . the [h]ouse of God’, as if a message about decay or ruination is trying to get out. Reading a medieval building can be baffling, but bafflement can be pleasurable, and the quiet enjoyment of a peaceful ruin can be too.

Hailes, Gloucestershire

Ruined choirs

The ruins of Hailes Abbey are just across the lane from the small church in my previous post. The abbey was founded in 1246 by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who was Henry III’s younger brother. Richard had the unusual additional title of King of the Romans, which was a sort of consolation prize because he had been elected Holy Roman Emperor by the German princes but his appointment had been rejected by the pope, who guarded jealously his power of veto over such appointments. Richard founded the abbey in thanks to God for surviving a shipwreck and it was home to a community of Cistercian monks. However, the abbey’s big boost came during the following generation, when Richard’s son, Edmund, gave it a phial of liquid that was said to be the blood of Christ.

It was Edmund’s donation in 1270 that made the abbey a major pilgrimage destination, second only in England to the shrine of St Thomas Beckett at Canterbury. The steady stream of pilgrims brought money to the abbey, and it was rebuilt in the 1270s, to create a very large complex. The place prospered until it was dissolved, like all England’s other monasteries, by Henry VIII in the 1530s. The foundations of the huge church can still be traced on the grass, as can fragments of the abbey’s domestic buildings such as the refectory, and several rows of arches still stand above the ground. Above is a photograph sourced on the internet that shows a little more of the site than I can see as I pass in the car on the way to our local farm shop.

When the abbey is open to the public, there’s much to see – including a good small museum explaining the history of the place and displaying some lovely fragments of carved stone that have survived the dismantling of most of the buildings after 1539. For now, it’s a lonely spot, one of the bare ruined choirs, as Shakespeare put it, where late the sweet birds sang.*

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* William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII

Photograph of Hailes Abbey © Saffron Blaze, used under Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 3.0

Orford, Suffolk

The wild side

January is likely to prove busy for me and anyway is a month often beset with the kind of weather that discourages travel and the photography of buildings. It therefore seems a good time to share an image or two from my Suffolk trip of a couple of months ago. I’m beginning with the parish church of the settlement at Orford, by the River Alde where it reaches Orford Ness and the sea. It’s a somewhat remote, quiet place now, and certainly was in the early Middle Ages, but this changed when Henry II built the great castle there in the 12th century. Along with the castle came a large church, servicing what must have been a much expanded town, with a large chancel flanked with arcades of semicircular arches.

By the 18th century the place was remote once more and the church had fallen into disrepair, with the once magnificent chancel in ruins. The Victorians hatched an ambitious plan to restore the church and the great Gothic specialist George Edmund Street was put on the case. But Street’s plans were not carried out and instead a slow, phased restoration was carried out that only ever got as far as the nave and aisles, which make a pleasant and sizeable church in their own right. The chancel was left in ruins.

And so it remains. Repairs in 1930 ensured that the ruins were stabilized. One range of arches, plus a couple of piers on the other side, remain as a reminder of past magnificence. As I have a weakness for ruins, especially those capable of sprouting a little vegetation without sustaining major damage, I rather like it this way, with the tussocky grass growing around the column bases. There’s space enough in the churchyard for a more kempt area around the main body of the church. In my book, there’s room for both the roofed building and the ruin, the neat and the unruly, the tame and the wild.

Boscobel, Shropshire

What we think about when we think about ruins

The other week I found myself not far from the ruins of White Ladies Priory, a medieval house of Augustinian canonesses in quiet, remote country in Shropshire. You walk up a muddy tree-lined track to the ruins and as you reach the site the trees part and the vista opens up so you take in not just the fragmentary walls of the monastery but also swathes of woods, fields, and rolling hills beyond. There’s not a lot here, but the place is so quiet that in the shadow of these few 12th-century walls you can get a sense of the peaceful life that the five canonesses, their prioress, and their few lay servants perhaps lived until Henry VIII closed the monasteries and forced the White Ladies (so called because of their pale linen habits) to leave.

Ruins, I find, encourage such thoughts about the past, and much else. They seem to bring us close to figures of the past – knights, it may be, or nuns, or canonesses, while at the same time, by their very ruination making the past seem remote. They evoke sympathy with their builders and opprobrium for the vandals, enemies, and demolition men who came after them. They warn us of our own mortality, and point to the disappointments with which our endeavours might end, giving us an image of our own melancholy in the process. They embody the confrontation of art and nature, but also remind us of the softening of the edges that time brings to buildings, the softening that Ruskin, for example, preferred to the hard lines of the new. They open up, in short, space for all kinds of Romantic contemplation of the past and present.

Not all of this is pleasurable, but there is a long tradition of the aesthetic and emotional enjoyment of ruins, an attitude that the Germans call Ruinenlust, a term turned into the English Ruin Lust in the title of an exhibition currently showing at Tate Britain in London. The Tate exhibition traces this back to the Romantics with magnificent pictures of Tintern Abbey (by Turner amongst others), and with Constable’s sketch of Hadleigh Castle. Other highlights include works by Piper, Sutherland, and Paul Nash, Jon Savage’s haunting images of Uninhabited London, and Jane and Louise Wilson’s photographs of Nazi fortifications on the Atlantic Wall. From John Martin’s vast canvas of the destruction of Pompeii to Tacita Dean’s Kodak, an elegy for 16 mm film, it’s thought-provoking stuff, of great visual richness.

And yet I longed for more – on the historical background of ruin-watching, for example. This goes back much further than the Romantic period, especially in literature. A scene in John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (c 1614), for example, has Antonio, the husband of the Duchess, meditating on ruins:

I do love these ancient ruins:
We never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history.
And questionless, here in this open court,
Which now lies naked to the injuries
Of stormy weather, some men lied interr’d
Lov’d the church so well, and gave so largely to’t,
They thought it should have canopy’d their bones
Till doomsday; but all things have their end…

In the first three lines of this speech, Antonio is alluding to John Florio’s English translation of Montaigne’s essays, in which Montaigne himself is quoting Cicero, which shows how far back such thoughts can be traced. Countless Renaissance painters, 18th-century poets, and their successors who are chronicled in the Tate exhibition have had similar thoughts and transmuted them into art. At the ruined priory in Shropshire I was not, I thought, too far from them in spirit as I scraped the mud from my shoes and thought of Charles I, who hid here when he escaped after the Battle of Worcester during the English Civil War and, before him, of the White Ladies walking in the lanes around their isolated church and monastery, 500 and more years ago.

Doorway, White Ladies Priory, Shropshire
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Among the books on responses to ruins are: Brian Dillon, Ruin Lust (Tate Publishing, 2014), produced for the exhibition; Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (Chatto & Windus, 2001); and, best of all, Rose Macaulay’s classic, Pleasure of Ruins (Thames and Hudson, 1966).

Great Tew, Oxfordshire

Backward glance (3): Not quite what it seems, not quite what it seemed

The third of my backward glances, taken because my current personal circumstances are limiting my travels in search of English buildings, pitches me back to the Cotswolds, the part of England where I grew up. What follows is actually a reprise of two connected posts about the Oxfordshire village of Great Tew.

Many people will know Great Tew as one of the most picture-postcard-perfect limestone villages, chocolate-box England. It's the sort of place that brings out the worst in the cliché-mongers who write about the English countryside,  the kind of language that John Russell, many years ago, referred to as 'the strange sexual-anthropomorphic idiom of English country-writers, in which villages nestle, valleys girdle, and rivers are said to have issue'. The nestling here is done by warm stone cottages among greenery and it is the kind of place to trick us into the illusion that it has always been this way…

Great Tew is all like this – thatched roofs, glowing, almost toffee-coloured ironstone walls, evergreen trees and hedges, all tucked neatly away in deepest North Oxfordshire. It’s archetypal rural England, the kind of village that’s been here for hundreds of years, growing organically and acquiring more patina with each century. But that’s not quite the story. The village is actually the creation of the early-19th century, when the estate was remodelled and the village became a star feature in the landscape. Thatched roofs were fitted or repaired, Gothic details added to the cottages, trees and hedges planted. The result is an uncanny combination of model estate village and old England. It’s not known for sure who masterminded the transformation, but the brain behind it might well have been landscape-gardener, writer, and horticulturalist J C Loudon. Loudon managed the estate for a few years and established a model farm. Whoever it was distilled the essence of the English village and left it in this North Oxfordshire valley.

My first post left something unsaid, something about my earliest experience of Great Tw, when I went there as a teenager in the early 1970s. Then the place was a far cry from idyllic. Half of it seemed to be falling down. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong…

Several people responded to my post about Great Tew with memories of how the place used to be about thirty years ago – neglected, with tattered thatch, broken windows, and a few tenants hanging on amongst the dilapidation. I seem to remember that the Sunday Times of the Harold Evans era featured it in a piece about shamefully unmaintained villages left to go to ruin by their landlords. When I went there in the 1970s the plight of the residents was dire. It seemed to take one back to the debunking essays of Robertson Scott (England's Green and Pleasant Land was the ironic title of his most famous book) that showed country life in the early 20th century for what it really was – cold, hard, and painful for many. And yet the place had an eerie quality evocative of another time that no spruced-up picture-postcard village could ever have had. The lost domain.

As far as I can remember, when I made that first visit there were already being efforts made to repair some of the houses and to put the village back on a sound footing. But the overwhelming impression was one of desolation. I knew that country life could be hard (memories of my grandparents in rural Lincolnshire involved bringing in pails of water from a spring, cooking on a coal range, oil lighting, and so on). But this was a far harder life. It jolted me into realization that country life was often far from idyllic and that warm stone could form a home to cold realities.

The photograph of the dilapidated cottage comes from TrekEarth, here, with thanks to Liberal England for the original link.

Pirton, Worcestershire

In the mist

On my way to find an unusual church tower I was driving through quiet country in Worcestershire now sandwiched between the M5 and the railway line that links Cheltenham and Bristol to the Midlands and the north. I rounded a bend and caught sight of this ruin hugging a hillside next to some trees.

Glimpsed through the mist like this it could easily be a forgotten fragment of medieval castle wall with one mural tower still clinging on. But it’s not medieval at all. It’s actually one of several eyecatchers erected in the countryside around the great house of Croome Court, once home of the Earls of Coventry. As well as garden buildings near the great house, there are several of these more distant structures scattered around the nearby countryside, designed either by Robert Adam (who did the interiors of the house in the mid-18th century) or by James Wyatt (who began work on the house and estate in 1792).

This sham ruin is by Wyatt. It is well over a mile from the house and an effective reminder of the size of the Coventry estate. And it was by no means the furthest away. Broadway Tower, a much bigger prospect tower, some 15 miles away, is also one of Lord Coventry’s buildings.

Much Wenlock, Shropshire

Space invaders

After the church, the chapter house was often the most impressive part of a medieval monastery – especially if that monastery was a house belonging to the Cluniacs, an order who were famous for their ornate buildings. This is part of the chapter house at Wenlock Abbey, which was originally a Saxon monastery but was re-established by the Cluniacs after the Norman conquest.

The monks of Wenlock built their chapter house in about 1140. Every day they met here, entering through a magnificent triple-arched doorway, and sitting down to discuss abbey business and hear a reading of one chapter of the monastic rule. What remains of the interior now is three high stone walls, each decorated with intricate multiple arcading. This kind of decoration, covered with chevron or pellet motifs or with carved mouldings, is a hallmark of the most elaborate late Norman architecture in England.

I photographed the one wall of the three that has plants growing on it. The other two are kept scrupulously clear of vegetation, but here nature is taking its course and the flowers (are they some form of campanula?) grow freely. I’m not sure if this is a conscious decision on the part of the building’s custodians, English Heritage, although I do know that they have approved of this kind of equilibrium between plants and stones at certain sites.

Deliberate or not, I like this modest invasion. The plants don’t seem to be doing any harm to the masonry and the unruly splash of colour they provide is welcome amongst the grey stone and clipped lawns. There is more than one way to display a ruin, and old buildings are hospitable to other species than our own.

South Bank, London

It would take a Piranesi to do justice to the shell of London’s Battersea Power Station, vast, roofless, and decaying by the side of Chelsea Bridge. I was reminded of it recently as I crossed the bridge in a train from Victoria on my way to a meeting, and I photographed it hastily through the dirty window of the carriage. Hence this picture, as far a cry from Piranesi as possible. Perhaps this sorry gap between ideal and actuality is appropriate in this case. Battersea Power Station, which came into service in 1939 on the back of the establishment of the National Grid, is said to be Britain’s biggest brick building. It’s a towering masterpiece designed by J Theo Halliday with Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (the latter also architect of Bankside Power Station, now Tate Modern, and the red telephone box) and represented something of a great hope for power generation in the mid-20th century – a hope fulfilled until 1983, when the enormous power plant was decommissioned. Scott was responsible for many of the most creative design touches, and the building set the style for power stations – and sundry other kinds of industrial building – for a couple of decades.

Since then the glory – the citadel-like walls, the Art Deco interior, the four great chimneys – has been in decline. The roof has gone (taken off to remove some of the building’s contents) and much of the structure is propped up with scaffolding. Meanwhile, several ambitious plans for the place (a theme park, a mixed development) have come and gone. Another scheme, featuring a large and controversial ‘eco-dome’, is being worked up and presented to the planners. Further controversy surrounds the state of the chimneys, with different authorities agreeing that they are in need of work, but disagreeing about whether this should involve a rebuild or a repair.

Much as I like the gaunt, desolate quality of the power station as it is now, I know that this structure needs looking after if its condition is not to get seriously worse. So whatever in the way of renovation, restoration, or conservation is needed, I hope it’s done soon, before the whole lot collapses on to the surrounding wasteland, leaving still more work for the modern-day Piranesi to come.

Great Witley, Worcestershire

I enjoy it when my explorations of buildings coincide with things I’m doing in other parts of my life. At the moment, I’m writing a book about mythology, so I was pleased to visit Witley Court in Worcestershire, with its fountain based on the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda.

Perseus has recently killed the Gorgon Medusa, and is flying through the sky on the winged horse Pegasus when he sees Andromeda chained to a rock. She’s been left there because her mother, Cassiopeia, has insulted some sea nymphs by saying that she, Cassiopeia, is more beautiful than them. Poseidon, god of the sea, is angered by this insult, so sends a sea monster to ravage the coast of Ethiopia, where Cassiopiea lives, and the beast will only be satisfied with the flesh of Andromeda. In the fountain sculpture, Perseus is about to dispatch the monster, before carrying off Andromeda and marrying her.

Witley Court itself is a fascinating building, now an evocative ruin. It began as a Jacobean country house, but was massively extended in both the Regency and Victorian periods to become one of the largest houses in the country. It was the famous scene of lavish house parties hosted by the owners, the Earl of Dudley, until the house was gutted in a fire in 1937. The ruin has now been stabilized and, courtesy of English Heritage, one can walk through the empty shells of rooms open to the skies, admiring fragments of wall decoration (a lot of it in carton pierre, which is rather like papier mâché) and meditating on charred timbers and lost glory.

Wigmore, Herefordshire

I grew up visiting castles. As a child I loved their otherness, and got as good at identifying shell keeps and barbicans as imagining Sir Nigel and Ivanhoe rampaging around inside. Like old churches, medieval castles were a rapid and accessible escape route into the rich parallel world of history.

Ancient as they were, the castles of my youth had, for the most part, a particular quality that wasn’t much to do with their medieval origins. They were nearly all in the care of the Ministry of Public Building and Works. You found them by following official governmental signs. Once there, you found your way round using smaller signs and a guidebook, bound in blue and, if you were lucky, equipped with a fold-out map stuck into the back of the booklet. You unfolded this rather beautifully drawn map, and tried to work out where you were while it tried to blow away in the wind or invert itself like a flimsy umbrella. And it was quite easy to see where you were going because everything was so cared for. Lawns were manicured, paths were well laid, walls were pointed.

I’m very grateful to the Ministry of Public Building and Works, later the Department of the Environment, later English Heritage, for looking after our castles in this way, and for giving me enjoyment and education in equal measure. But wasn’t it all a bit too kempt? And how much did those lawns and concrete paths have to do with medieval history? There is another way: welcome to Wigmore Castle.

The fragmentary 12th-century ruins of Wigmore Castle are on a hill overlooking the Welsh-English border. When conservators looked at how best to preserve these isolated towers, arches, and bits of wall a few years ago, they decided to stabilize the masonry but not to clean up the growths of plant and bush that have invaded the place over the last few centuries. So an expert in nature conservation worked alongside those in building conservation.

The result is wonderful. Coming here you get a sense that you’re exploring as walls and towers loom out of the undergrowth. And my foraging wife found ripe blackberries for us to eat while I admired the masonry. Be warned: with its steep steps and muddy paths this isn’t a place for people who are unsteady on their legs. But if you can put up with the rough terrain, it’s a good place to come to witness the flowering of a ruin.