KEAY: I’m trying to save an amazing building outside Edinburgh, a house called Mavisbank, which was built in the 1720s for a man who was one of our great renaissance figures, the great pioneer of the Scottish Enlightenment. It’s the most beautiful, beautiful house. It’s derelict, just walls standing, but the ceilings and the roofs have fallen in, and it’s clinging onto life by its fingernails. My great hope for what I’m doing next is being able to raise the money to save it from collapse. COWEN: My British YIMBY friends claim to me that the cost of living is too high here, and we need to build at least 2 million new homes, mostly in the south of England. Do you agree, and would that threaten heritage? An exceptional feat of imagination. Never have the kingless years been made so vivid, and never has vividness contributed so much to the understanding of them. Keay has brought off an ingenious literary experiment… An entrancing achievement’ Professor Blair Worden, Times Literary Supplement This is before the advent of the written word. There seems to be an almost anthropological universality of the idea that doing something special on your head is a way of setting you apart. This is very, very clearly monarchs doing it because their predecessors do it. We see it in the Middle Ages. Henry III, who was a great, long-lived, and successful medieval monarch, really lionized his predecessor by several generations, Edward the Confessor, who’d been canonized by the Catholic Church — there was a saint. And the graves were opened of previous monarchs. Crowns which had been buried with them were got out, and so on. It’s not that I don’t think there’s a role for building new houses, but I think it’s an easy choice that suits the developer very well, thank you very much, to get a field and build some houses on it and sell it off. The task of saying, “How do we make sure our geography and our wonderful towns and villages are full of life, and how do we use what we’ve got?” requires a bit more imagination. But I think that the opportunity there is absolutely enormous, and I long to see somebody really grasp that.

KEAY: Yes. Prosperity was in the Middle Ages, and then it essentially disappeared from the league table of affluence in the UK, as the industrial towns of the north, which is where big-scale cotton production and so on really took off. As a consequence, as a part of the UK, it is very, very beautiful. It’s not very wealthy at all, and it’s very unurbanized because it essentially still has its kind of medieval and early modern landscape, both in terms of buildings and topography.There’s a wonderful place up near Liverpool called Port Sunlight, which was all laid out by a great industrialist — absolutely the most beautiful place that you could imagine — for people who would be working for him. There’s something about the aspiration of beauty and a sense of responsibility for creating it.

The crown was made for Charles II in 1661. It is named after a much earlier version that belonged to the Anglo-Saxon king and saint, Edward the Confessor. He was depicted wearing a crown in the famous 11th century Bayeux Tapestry.COWEN: If the House of Lords were abolished, as Labour has proposed — as you know — would that make it harder for policy to protect heritage in Britain? Deft, confident, deeply learned and provocative, underpinned by an extraordinary sense of the landscape and the architecture … Anna Keay traces with fierce intelligence the remarkable and restless lives’ Rory Stewart KEAY: Well, what I would say is that you must never underestimate just how much our ancestors cared about keeping warm. You think we care about it, and the cost of warming our houses, but if you had to chop every log that warmed your sitting room, you’d pretty much be focused on it, too.