A competitor participates in the Tough Mudder challenge near Henley-on-Thames in southern England May 2, 2015. (Photo by Eddie Keogh/Reuters)

Pete McLeod of Canada flies in formation with Nigel Lamb of Great Britain, Martin Sonka of the Czech Republic and Kirby Chambliss of the United States during a Recon flight prior to the seventh stage of the Red Bull Air Race World Championship over the Hoover Dam on October 09, 2014 on the border between the U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada. (Photo by Joerg Mitter/Red Bull via Getty Images)

People take pictures of the sunset in Berlin October 27, 2014. (Photo by Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)

Pawel Karpinski and Nadine Kinczel of Poland dance as they compete during IPC Wheelchair Dance Sport European Championships in Lomianki near Warsaw, November 9, 2014. (Photo by Kacper Pempel/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.

In this Thursday, May 31, 2018 photo, a temporary worker using a lantern collects white asparagus from a field in Caparroso, around 85 km (52 miles) from Pamplona, northern Spain. Dubbed the “white gold” of these northern Spanish farms because of their color and the high price they fetch in markets and restaurants around the world, the stringy delicacy is planted every fall and picked each year between April and June, at the height of the spring. (Photo by Alvaro Barrientos/AP Photo)

A pine marten – one of a few wild mammals doing well in Britain (although they number just 3,700). A fifth of the country’s wild mammals are at high risk of extinction, research shows. (Photo by Maurice Flynn/The Mammal Society)

A German rifleman beside the corpse of a French soldier in a trench at Fort Vaux, France, 1916. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)