Bermuda's Architectural Heritage Series. Sandys. Bermuda National Trust.

The third in a series of books designed to preserve the Island's unique architectural heritage is a gem equal to the marvellous homes featured from -- this time out -- Sandys Parish.

And the book is a treasure trove, not just of buildings, but of the historical eccentricities which still find an echo today.

As the book rightly states -- Sandys/Somerset is dominated both architecturally, and to a certain extent culturally, by the `Gibraltar of the West'' -- the old Royal Naval Dockyard.

Transplanted workers created a standard-issue 19th century Imperial presence in the West End -- and for the many who stayed, their architecture owed as much to England and the West Indies as to anything Bermudian.

But what really shines through the book is the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Indeed, any member of HM Customs browsing through these pages is bound to have a pang of sympathy for his 18th century counterparts.

Bermudian sailors, free of the Bermuda Company's closed shop restrictions, used the West End's host of narrow channels to unload as much of their lucrative cargoes as possible before presenting themselves at St. George's to pay the duty.

Even the sometimes complicated family relationships of the Island today might pale in comparison with the Somerset Harveys -- Captain Henry Harvey amassed a Sandys property empire based on a series of marriages, four in all.

Even arson, recently in the headlines, gets a look in. A Harvey-built dry goods store, the Armoury, was razed to the ground not once, but twice.

According to The Royal Gazette of the day, around four attempts had been made to torch the building. It's now, rebuilt and altered over the years, Mangrove Bay Post Office.

And one wonders why the name Torwood -- one of the tiny remnants of the Great Caledonian Forest near this writer's Scottish home town -- was chosen for the house once known as Cambridge. But the family who changed the name was called Campbell and may have originally hailed, literally, from that neck of the woods.

But even some cherished myths take a knock -- the typically Bermudian buildings known as butteries (to keep perishable food cool) -- err, weren't.

Most, we learn, were used for the more practical but considerably less attractive purpose of outside loos.

And another surprise is the number of what must have been fine -- and significant -- homes, now sadly reduced to ruins.

Some legends may have a basis in fact -- like the oriental look to Dockyard's famous clock towers comes because the building was designed for Singapore, not Bermuda.

One criticism is the lack of colour photographs -- perhaps a matter of cost in an otherwise beautifully written and designed book.

Raymond Hainey BOOK REVIEW REV