Welsh Journals

REVIEWS EDWARD HUBBARD, The Buildings of Wales: Clwyd (Denbighshire and Flintshire), (Penguin Books, 1986) 519pp. 125pl. £ 17.95. This second volume of The Buildings of Wales is a substantial volume, yet compact enough that it can be used for what it was planned, namely as a portable 'enquire within' rather than merely a library reference book. It consists of three main sections: general introductions to the archaeology of the county (by Frances Lynch) and to the buildings and building materials (altogether 80 pages), glossaries and indices (50 pages), and the detailed gazetteers which make up over three- fifths of the book. It follows precedent in interpreting the term 'building' very widely, using it to embrace any substantial man-made structure: hence the gazetteers include prehistoric cairns, Roman remains, medieval castles, and there- after everything within the built environment, regarded by the author as of importance up to and including major works of the present generation of architects. It is, therefore, of much wider scope than any other book on the architecture of the county, and by treating Victorian and modem architecture with as great consideration as that of earlier periods, the author has enlarged our horizons considerably. Mind you, his treatment of Victorian buildings is not mere uncritical adulation: such phrases as 'ignorant in detail, but not without charm' (St Mary's Church, Betws Road, Llanrwst, p. 236), are used when appropriate. The two introductory sections synthesise the details of the subsequent gazetteers. Each section is admirably detailed, but suffers from the inherent drawback of the county format, namely that sites and buildings within Clwyd need to be put into a rather wider perspective. This is particularly true for prehistoric sites which cannot present a coherent picture within as small (and as recently defined) a region as Clwyd. The longer introduction to medieval and later buildings is a very concise but detailed and authoritative analysis of stylistic developments in all branches of architecture and the associated applied arts. However it contains some awkward jumps from the Act of Union to Celtic crosses (p. 30), from Edward I to the Renaissance (p. 42), from eighteenth-century farm buildings to Restoration houses (p. 52) and it seems strange to describe the planning of mediaeval houses after that of post-mediaeval regional houses. A number of general points would doubtless have been qualified in a longer essay. There are mediaeval canopied stalls at St. David's Cathedral as well as at St Asaph (p. 35). The majority of so-called 'hammer-beam' roofs are in fact a post-mediaeval simplified version (e.g. pi. 28) with a non-structural wall-post and brace (p. 32). Plas-mawr, Conwy