The local knowledge in spades
Harry Mount
PEMBROKESHIRE by Thomas Lloyd, Julian Orbach and Robert Scourfield Yale. £29.95, pp. 549, ISBN 0300101783 For snoopers who like doing 'sweepers' — walking uninvited up the drive to grand houses to give them the once-over — Pevsner architectural guides are a godsend.
Every chunk of Adam plasterwork, every Palladian folly, every mossclogged machicolation; the late Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, and now his acolytes, turf them all up and give you chapter and verse. From the cowardly comfort of your armchair, you can do the most intrusive and heart-bustingly exciting of virtual sweepers, because the three authors behind this masterpiece have done all the knocking on doors and the 'I'm awfully sorry but do you mind if I look at your garderobe?' stuff for you.
In what ranks as one of the greatest ever feats of scholarship, every single significant building in England has been Pevsnered. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are now being hoovered up. A new Pevsner to a county you know well — I have holidayed in Pembrokeshire since I was a baby in the early Seventies — is like being given a completely comprehensive study to your own body. You find out staggering things you never knew existed, and there are a million revelations about the things you thought you knew inside out.
Thanks to the geniuses who put this book together, I discovered, just four miles from the holiday cottage I have gone to ten times a year for over two decades, a remarkable late-14th-century tower: Eastington, the perfect example of a Pembrokeshire mediaeval stone building, with a nine-bay, 18th-century farmhouse attractively glued to its side. I was put off real-life sweepers when the farmer pulled up in his minivan, but I could gaze, entranced, from the road.
And, while I was gazing, I could also look up at the great, stonking towers of the oil refinery above Eastington and learn all about them too (built 1962-4 by the Texaco petrol company) from this brilliant vademecum of a book. Because Pevsner and his heirs are no style-snobs; in fact Sir Nikolaus loved brutal modernism.
Anything that grabs the attention, of any date — from the Upper Palaeolithic Hoyle's Mouth cave in Tenby of 28,000 BC to the 1998 cliffside Teletubby pod looking over the sea to Ireland, owned by the Labour MP Bob Marshall Andrews — gets a mention. My favourite memorial on earth, the tablet in Tenby church to Robert Recorde, the mathematician and inventor of the equals sign, is duly registered.
The refusal to condemn — or lavish praise — is the only fault in this magical book. It was the same criticism that Sir John Betjeman made of the Good Herr Doktor, as he used to call him, with all the attendant sniping at Pevsner's meticulous, bloodless approach to buildings that the nickname implies.
Yes, Thomas Lloyd et al will give details of families, but only the barest reference. If there's a jolly anecdote about some ancient scandal or some
modern chatelaine, we don't hear it. There's just one juicily salacious story in the whole book: the one about Sir John Bryce, the baronet buried in Haverfordwest church, whose third wife only consented to marriage on condition that he removed the embalmed bodies of her two predecessors from the bedroom.
Lloyd himself is the widower of a scion of the family that owns Cresselly House, one of the loveliest in the county. He's brilliant on every single little detail of this 18th-century gem, from the wrought-iron balusters made by William Moss of Carmarthen to the late rococo decorative ceiling with its delicate vine tendrils and its cartouche with crossed musical instruments and open score. But there's no mention of Mr Lloyd's connection to the place or any of the billion and one vignettes that grow out of ancient families in ancient houses. The only other problem — not a criticism — is how long this super-useful book can physically survive. Less than a month since I got this lovely sturdy hardback in the post, it is already battered: stuffed too many times into coat pockets and glove compartments, and dragged through woods and over stiles in the pouring rain in search of collapsed dissenters' chapels. Multiple copies required.
Harry Mount's My Brief Career: The Trials of a Young Lawyer is published by Short Books at £9.99.
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