Behind the scenes in winter: Falkland Palace
Transcript
1 speaker: Ashley Turner
Ashley
My name is Ashley Turner.
I am a conservation architect and I work for the National Trust for Scotland as a Regional Building Surveyor for the Edinburgh & East region.
I'm here today at Falkland Palace.
Being a building surveyor at the Trust, it varies day on day and it varies property by property.
Quite often a Monday morning can start with a phone call from a property.
An issue has become apparent over the weekend and you have to go out to assess what has caused that and come up with a plan to address the issues.
Then, more generally, we undertake a rolling programme of surveys to identify where there are maintenance deficits with the buildings and where we can focus our efforts to make sure that the buildings are well looked after.
We're looking at some of the ancillary structures on the grounds.
That includes a Victorian glasshouse.
We are working with local craftsmen, Laing Traditional Joinery.
It's a family business, and they have worked for the National Trust for Scotland for two generations now and are experts at what they do.
So, we're working with them to identify areas of decay on the glasshouse, and they're working through a project to restore that at the moment.
That has been going on now for about 6 months and has been supported by funding through Historic Environment Scotland.
We're in the process of planning some work to the Tapestry Gallery.
Over the past number of months, given the extreme weather that we've been having in Scotland, we've noticed an increase in rainfall, which is finding its way into the Tapestry Gallery.
So, we're planning some work at the moment to address the issues with the external envelope by undertaking roof maintenance and looking at the masonry.
We're able to care for places like this because of your support, so thank you.
With increasingly extreme weather events, the importance of year-round conservation work becomes ever more prominent. Our Regional Building Surveyor for Edinburgh & East shares some of the work that goes into caring for our precious buildings.
We are enormously grateful to our supporters for making this work possible – thank you!
Some of our building conservation activity at Falkland has also been made possible by Historic Environment Scotland (HES), most recently through its Partnership Fund. This funding is enabling our charity to undertake a programme of conservation maintenance at numerous sites around the country, use technology to better understand our built structures, and invest in further training and skills development.
Please note that permission for drone flying was granted by the National Trust for Scotland. Please contact filming@nts.org.uk for recreational and commercial drone filming enquiries.
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Falkland Palace
A fine Renaissance palace with an extensive formal garden and one of Britain’s oldest tennis courts
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