Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/47

 Wales. The number, for instance, of the homesteads, whether manor houses or farmhouses, or cottages, of Wales, which are old, is already comparatively small. The vast majority of the old churches of Wales have been restored out of all recognition. You can go to the various glens in Wales and various countrysides, where some of the very loveliest churches in this country used to be, and instead of those beautiful buildings that attract and extort the admiration even of the most aggressive politician, what will you find? Not these ancient buildings, except one here and there, but spick and span churches that you would not really spend half an hour in crossing over fields to see. I have felt the deepest and bitterest regret in going to certain parts of Wales, where there were some of these magnificent old churches, and finding hardly a stone or trace of the old church, which has been replaced by some utterly modern and characterless building.

But there are enough manor houses and farmhouses and cottages in Wales still to show us that there was almost instinctively in the