100 Books I Keep Keeping... 18 Great Romantic Ruins of England and Wales
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Great Romantic Ruins of England and Wales by Brian Bailey (1984)
This is a book I've had for years and years now. I have quite a few bought over the years along these lines, coffee table books full of descriptions and pictures of antiquities and ruins in different countries all over the world.
Like most of them, it's totally picturesque and nicely photographed, both in colour and black and white (though I have seen other, later ones that were better, quite possibly because of advances in technology), with brief but probably useful instructions on how to reach them by car. And the places they show and describe feed both my travel wishes and my imagination. And speaking of the latter...
There's at least one that is a main reason this book has a special place in my 'never to be culled' list.
Of all the places in this book - the Usual Suspects (such as Stonehenge, Fountains and Tintern Abbey, Wenlock Priory, Corfe and Kenilworth Castle, and the so evocative Castle Rising in Norfolk) and the lesser known and often splendidly named (Grimspond in Devon, Hardknott Fort in Cumbria, Appuldurcombe House on the Isle of Wight), there is one that has fed my imagination, my fascination for mysterious, magical doorways, and some of my writing ever since I first read it. Pickworth Church...
Or what is left of it. And yes, it's a very plain and almost baldly uncreative photo (one of the lesser ones in the book, though the prose is actually better, more personalised than most :) but for me, that almost makes it better... there's nothing else there. Just a crumbling entrance to nowhere...