Chapel News

Here's a touch of Huw Edwards with some of the purple prose that ought to feature in the 10 O'Clock News, but doesn't.

It's from the Annual Review of the National Churches Trust: here's the intro.

The past half-century, a period of base neglect, has seen hundreds of cherished buildings flattened without heed. There is a bitter twist at work here. Wales has suffered a campaign of cultural sacking approved by elected and unelected officials; but many of those responsible have had little understanding of the scale of the loss. 

In Wales today, those tokens of Plantagenet savagery, the medieval castles, are cared for with a vigilance approaching the fetishistic. We willingly revere these symbols of our oppression. And it follows that our national authorities accord them maximum listed protection. 

In this same Wales, those heroic symbols of our Nonconformist freedom, the chapels, are neglected, disdained and spurned. They lie rotting and decomposed in town centres, casually vandalised. They are invisible and irrelevant. They seldom pierce the people’s awareness, but when they do, they provoke repugnance and scorn.

Overall, tt's a pretty hard-nosed attack on CADW, "the Welsh Government’s historic environment service working for an accessible and well-protected historic environment for Wales".