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

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

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

A grey seal basks under a rainbow on a beach on the Lincolnshire coast, England on November 21, 2017. (Photo by Sean Weekly/Caters News Agency)

A surfer rides a wave at the snowy beach of Unstad, in Lofoten Island, Arctic Circle, on March 9, 2016. Surfers from all over the world comes to Lofoten island to surf in extrem conditions. Ocean temperature is 6-7 °C, air temperature around 0°C in spite of a weather very unstable. (Photo by Olivier Morin/AFP Photo)

A child sleeps under a table at the Jorkpan market in Sinkor district in Monrovia, Liberia on May 2, 2016. (Photo by Marco Longari/AFP Photo)

A rickshaw man runs under the blooming cherry blossoms in Tokyo, Sunday, March 29, 2015. (Photo by Shizuo Kambayashi/AP Photo)