Posted by: Blog Administrator
on Jan 12, 2012
Later last year I had the good fortune to look at a tiny tumbledown cottage of c1815 at Cloatley End, Hankerton. You might wonder why I considered this a treat, as the front wall had fallen down after several years of being abandoned, and the roof had collapsed over it, necessitating a very cautious crawl into the interior with a hard hat on to see anything of the inside. The answer is simple: The occupants of this house were so poor that very little was ever done to improve it, with the consequence that it was rich in original detail, despite its dilapidation. The present owner hopes to restore it, and put back as much of the original fabric as possible – no mean feat since the bricks of the front wall, which are hand-made odd-shaped wasters from the then local kiln up the road, now lie scattered about the site. These bricks were used to line the inside of thin rubblestone skin, much like builders do today, except the brick has been exchanged for concrete block.
View of the cottage
Entrance was directly into a small, unheated room containing the planked stair to the upper floor, now no more. The inner room still had its plain hearth, the surround now gone, and old plaster lined the walls. The original floor, partition wall and roof timbers were still there, rough-hewn out of the round.
Posted by: Blog Administrator
on Sep 9, 2011
Tagged in:
Victorian ,
ventriloquist ,
Treasures ,
survey ,
scroll ,
Riverside ,
preservation ,
Money-Kyrle ,
Methuen ,
Mervyn Grist ,
log book ,
King George III ,
hairdresser ,
flying fish ,
ElizabethI ,
Corsham Court ,
conservation ,
Calcutta ,
Boer War ,
Archive Conservator ,
Archive ,
Arabic
Preservation goes hand in hand with conservation and, as part of the Archive Conservation team’s overview and collections care, a box survey was implemented in 1991. Still ongoing twenty years later, we are gradually surveying the contents of every box in the county archive. This enables us to monitor the condition of the archive, discard or replace unsuitable packaging, pins and staples, to make sure the contents are not packed incorrectly and to check that boxes are not over full.
Besides the important preservation and conservation aspect of the survey, it is also a wonderful opportunity to discover ‘lost’ treasures and to investigate collections unopened for many years, and in some cases perhaps decades. Some are yet to be fully catalogued.
