excerpt from the book...
The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for
indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest nooks
of western England, where the wild and tragic features of the coast
had long combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the
ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it, throwing into extraordinary
discord all architectural attempts at newness there. To restore the
grey carcases of a mediaevalism whose spirit had fled, seemed a not
less incongruous act than to set about renovating the adjoining crags
themselves.