Johns, who had wide knowledge as a crusader castle archaeologist in the Palestine Department of Antiquities in the 1930s and 1940s, and immediately after the war had been seconded from the Royal Commission to be the British controller of antiquities and excavations in Libya. His was a name to conjure with in Middle Eastern archaeology for long after, and he applied his field experience to good effect in north Wales. During the years of recovery and growing prosperity in the 1950s and early 1960s, the staff grew in number and became more specialised in both field survey and site and building recording, eventually with a specialist photographer and professional illustrator, all of whose services ensured that the three Caernarfonshire volumes published between 1956 and 1964 maintained and enhanced the standards achieved in the Anglesey book twenty years earlier. Petrol rationing at first had delayed the fieldwork, which was made more difficult, too, by mountainous terrain and bad weather. An important modification of the principles was made to extend the cut-off date for recording vernacular architecture of Wales from 1714 to 1750, with some examination of buildings constructed between then and 1850. These changes in the evolution of the Commission's interpretation of "historic monuments" reflected the passage of time and the life of buildings, as well as ideas about what should be recorded and preserved. In the more industrialised counties of Wales this would shortly raise very large issues for the Commission's future programme. like the earlier stress on "humbler dwellings" in the Anglesey inventory (of which a new edition appeared in 1960), the modifications doubtless owed much to Cyril Fox, still one of the commissioners, and to the publication of his and Lord Raglan's three volumes on Monmouthshire Houses in 1951-4. The Caernarfonshire books broke new ground in their recording of hundreds of huts and field systems, site descriptions like that of Caernarfon Castle (in Volume II), and the space given to local vernacular architecture and the small churches of the Caernarfonshire countryside. Volume II recorded the discoveries of the Roman marching camp at Penygwryd and Roman fort at Pen Llystyn. Volume III included the first complete survey ever made of Bardsey, the Isle of Saints. The whole enterprise was informed by a multiplicity of skilful plans and maps, as well as by hundreds of photographs. National Monuments Record of Wales In 1963 responsibility for the National Buildings Record was