Scotland on Sunday

One evening last summer I spent an hour or two dialling and redialling the same telephone number in order to cast a vote for the conservation of a building I had never seen. It was a fruitless exercise. Mavisbank House, in Loanhead, near Edinburgh, one of the finalists in the BBC 2 Restoration series, was eliminated - my feverish dialling got it nowhere. Why on earth did I bother? Here is a fine, but crumbling building, a Palladian villa with its past behind it, which will take many millions to preserve and which, in a country already rich with crumbling buildings, is hardly unique. Let it crumble, as John Ruskin would certainly have argued. "Restoration," he once wrote, "means the most total destruction which a building can suffer... it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture… Do not let us talk then of restoration, the thing is a Lie from beginning to end."