A cooling tower is seen under mechanical demolition in Binzhou, Shandong Province, China, July 13, 2016. (Photo by Reuters/China Daily)

Cars drive under a rainbow near Bad Langensalza, Germany, Wednesday, November 2, 2016. (Photo by Jens Meyer/AP Photo)

A schoolgirl walks on an under-construction railway track at Navapura, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, November 29, 2019. (Photo by Amit Dave/Reuters)

Bad Christmas gift makes the pretty girl look disappointed in x-mas time under the christmas tree. (Photo by pixelrain/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Workers sleep on a railway track under repair in New Delhi, India, June 15, 2018. (Photo by Saumya Khandelwal/Reuters)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

Multicolored nets are set under olive trees to collect the olives on November 27, 2013 in Castagniers, southeastern France. (Photo by Valery Hache/AFP Photo)

A cow is seen on land that used to be under water, at the Aculeo Lagoon in Paine, Chile, May 14, 2018. (Photo by Matias Delacroix/Reuters)