This lavishly illustrated book is the latest publication by Dr Eurwyn Wiliam, ‘the acknowledged authority on the smaller traditional buildings of Wales’ and currently chairman of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. Much of the fieldwork was done in the 1970s, while he was on the staff of the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, and includes features since lost when buildings were demolished or renovated. His love for his subject and for his country is apparent throughout. Much of the information is not specific to cottages but is relevant to the study of all vernacular buildings throughout Wales. The illustrations include many before-and-after photographs, both black-and-white and colour, constructional details, plans and sections and distribution maps. Most importantly, the photographs put the people in the buildings, both the occupants (often posed outside their cottages) and the craftsmen old and new. Contemporary drawings and paintings also bring life to the buildings, with details such as a hay rake leaning against a wall, a pair of boots lying on a mantelshelf next to a kettle and a rushlight holder, and a curtained bed with a chamber pot beneath.

The text is interspersed with descriptions by contemporary travellers and commentators from the late eighteenth through to the early twentieth century. They include the appearance of cottages inside and out, and detailed accounts of building methods, such as making a mortar floor. Many of the techniques described have been tried out at St Fagans when reconstructing buildings. A page of the notebook of the Revd Walter Davies, including a sketch of a cottage to show thatch details, reveals the richness of these contemporary sources. There is a word of warning, however, that the standards of living described may not be entirely typical; some writers deliberately chose the worst examples of cottage life in order either to shock or to amuse their readers, and anti-Welsh bias was common in descriptions written before the mid-eighteenth century.

The chapters on geography and settlement, traditional buildings in Wales (including farmhouses as well as cottages), walls, roofs and interiors contain a wealth of information. ‘Walls’ includes doors, windows, exterior decoration and roof structure, perhaps inevitable when this includes cruck buildings, but the chapter might have been better titled ‘Construction’. Little is known about early cottage doors and windows, as few original fixtures and fittings survive, and this section is brief, but the photographs of three doors are very informative. One, described as a seventeenth- to eighteenth-century door, has an identical pattern of decorative nails to an attic door of 1631 at Kew Palace and may be earlier than the author has supposed. It is almost certainly reused from a larger house. Likewise, the double-thickness door appears to be an eighteenth-century door reused with a second layer of vertical planks added on the outside in the later nineteenth century.

‘Roofs’ discusses stone, slate and the various thatching methods and materials in enormous detail, and is ‘the first nationwide study of Welsh thatching methods to be published’. Chapter 7, ‘Builders, investments and lifestyles’, analyses the process of building a cottage in terms of time, materials, labour and cost. It is instructive to learn that, by the mid-nineteenth century, it was cheaper for builders in Merthyr to transport slates from Caernarfon quarries by sailing vessel and then canal than to buy slates from Breconshire quarries a few miles away. Such issues are equally relevant today, and in the concluding chapter the author addresses questions of modern lifestyles, sustainability and the importance of preserving not just a few examples but a substantial amount of the cottage housing stock in Wales.

There are some faults and difficulties due to poor editing, and the book is not always easy for English-speaking readers. The statement on p 161 that ‘cawn’ is ‘pronounced with a hard “a” ’ means nothing to a non-Welsh speaker, to whom the idea of a hard vowel is baffling. Many Welsh words and phrases are carefully explained, but there is no explanation that ‘tai’ is the plural of ‘ty’ (house). One caption to a photograph refers to a ‘tyddyn’ with no explanation that it means a smallholding; a glossary would have been useful. Likewise, the key to the plans in fig 53 appears to be bilingual, using ‘L’ for living room but ‘S’ for ground-floor bedroom (Welsh ‘siambr’, chamber).

The captions to the illustrations stand alone as additions to the text, but it would be much easier to read if the text included a figure number for those illustrations specifically referred to. One early writer, Iolo Morganwg, is quoted extensively from p 97 on, but there is no indication of the date at which he was writing until p 109. The statements on p 133, that ‘locks are almost unknown’, but on p 139 that the principal doors were ‘secured by a boxed lock’, are puzzling. Were nineteenth-century cottage doors really made of planks up to a foot wide? By this date, door planks in England were invariably much narrower. Inconsistencies such as the use of both imperial and metric measurements in some chapters but not in others are problematic, as, for example, in the statement ‘two 6-feet circles with a 0.9 metre gap between them’. There is inconsistency in the treatment of references; published sources, referring to the ten pages of bibliography, are placed in the text in brackets, while unpublished sources are relegated to the six pages of endnotes. Tighter editing would have made this invaluable book so much easier to use.

Despite the editorial deficiencies and occasional lapses in logic or clarity, this book is full of fascinating information and wonderful illustrations and is a must for anyone interested in cottages in general or Welsh buildings in particular.