A Change of Pace

We’re well into September now and the signs of autumn are sneaking in slowly, which means the winter season in the forestry department is almost upon us. More forestry news next time but this post focuses on my new voluntary role in the Hall.

A large scale project is underway to update all the wiring in Wimpole Hall itself and generally smarten that side of the maintenance up (i.e. do away with spare and loose wires that doesn’t go anywhere). Yes no more will you flick a switch, look around blankly and wonder what the heck that was supposed to turn on!

Of course this involves taking up the flooring in pretty much every room in the House, and there are a lot of them in there believe me! This obviously means that anything in the rooms needs to be protected either in situ or stored away while the work is being undertaken.

Thinking this would be a good opportunity to expand my skills a bit and edge into the conservation side of archaeology, I put my name down to help out. With the project being broken down into several different voluntary roles, I picked two to add to my already busy schedule.

What a View! Hey, who put that window in the way?!

So now I am on the textiles team (TT), a small group of us that are involved in conserving items such as curtains and carpets. This also includes everything textile related such as lamp shades, napkins, cushions etc, you get the idea.

The first official day for the TT was last Wednesday and we were up in the attics organising the archive room. This basically concerned unloading a rack filled with boxes of textiles that had been archived previously.

Sounds simple enough? Well there were a lot of boxes and they just kept on coming! There also came the problem of where the heck do you put these while we move the racking around. The small room next door sucked up some of the boxes in no time at all so we were forced to expand out in the corridor! When that space got short we had to extend further down the corridor past a fragile kneeler (more on that later).

With everything off and nicely stacked nearby it was time to move the racking…but wait, all that moving is thirsty work! A tea-break in hand later and we were back on the job.

Even with an empty rack it was still heavy, so next the shelving was coming out! Eventually it was movable so we rotated 90 degrees parallel with the other racking. We suddenly realised that taking a photo of the job before hand might have been a good idea as everything now had to go back on the correct shelves. Even though there was a print-out of what was on each shelf it wasn’t up to date!

Nevertheless we ultimately succeeded in restoring the shelves to their (kind of) original state. With a bit more manoeuvring with some other tables and objects it was pretty much job done!

Deciding it was time for lunch we made our way through the House. I took the opportunity to take some snaps before leaving the area…nice view from that high up! The afternoon would be a much more conservation-angled affair…

Maggie, Mary and Meta

That's only half of it!

…namely boxing up a church kneeler that Olga had stored in the attic in the past. Now this kneeler is no small item, it’s a good 6 – 8 metres in length and easily takes up most of the corridor it’s been resting in!

First job; an in depth inspection to look for any bugs and beasties that might be residing (or munching through) on or in the kneeler. Powerful lamps were used as the corridor was pretty gloomy even with the overhead light bulb on! On hands and knees we scoured every inch of the material, finding the odd evidence of insect life (discarded wing cases) but on the whole it seemed quite clear.

The next comedy moment came when we had to roll out the acid free paper. In a tight corridor with not a great deal of space this quickly became a tricky job especially trying to straddle, lift and move the paper all at the same time! And that’s with three people!! No there wasn’t any photos of that either; I’m not superman you know!

Anyhoo, with that little struggle nicely conquered it was down to the gallery to cut and score some sheets of Borex (I think that was it, I’m pretty sure it was very similar to Botox). We may also have had a cuppa about then too. Basically it’s a corrugated composite sandwiched between two outer layers of the same stuff; sturdy too.

Back up to the kneeler and it was just a case of sliding the sheets underneath and taping them up along the open seams, presto! A job well done and just the first of a vast number of objects to conserve… the adventure begins.

Oh by the way, you have no idea how hard it was trying to type conservation and accidentally writing conversation by mistake! We certainly did a lot of conversation that day!!