What fun for fogeys young and old to have a new and updated Pevsner Guide to Berkshire to poke their noses into. The book is the latest in the Buildings of England series from Yale University Press at £35.

Ironically, the book’s front cover is even adorned with a picture of Ashdown House, Ashbury, which everyone knows is in Oxfordshire.

The description of the Restoration house, built for the Earl of Craven in 1661-2, states delightfully: “The doll’s house-like profile calls to mind Francois Mansart’s Balleroy in Normandy (c1626); the detailing, though, owes more to Rubens’s Palazzi di Genova, published in English in 1662, and to Dutch domestic architecture.”

It adds: “Craven was the protector of Charles I’s sister Elizabeth, the ‘Winter Queen’ (1596-1662), and the house may have been intended for her occasional use.”

From a fogey point of view the best bit is that the compilers of the updated Guides have completely ignored the county boundary changes brought about by the Local Government Act of 1974, thus many places that are now in Oxfordshire are in this volume — which, by the way, is more than twice as thick as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s original of 1966.

This fogey loved that — having never accepted that the Berkshire Downs for instance, containing the White Horse, are now part of Oxfordshire.

The new book is the result of work begun in 2002 as a research project at Reading University with a team of volunteers.

Their notes provided the basis for revised descriptions by Dr Geoffrey Tyack of Kellogg College, Oxford, and Simon Bradley, editor of the series.