#Instagram #Live for #AIP #Jammers: Repairing #DunansBridge and #DunansCastle

This week I was asked to update the Adventures in Preservation Volunteers (or jammers) on our projects for 2021, so on Friday at 5pm I livestreamed from the bridge and then took my viewers on a short walk to the castle to give them a flavour of what the project would consist next year.

The details are that we will be welcoming jammers for a fortnight in May and September – the details are available here.

Refurbishing Dunans Bridge …

The repairs to the bridge are wonderful progress toward the full refurbishment of this Telford-designed A-listed structure. It seems amazing to me that these are the first thorough-going repairs to the bridge since the 19th Century when the stanchions were reinforced with concrete. It just shows how durable Mr Telford’s design is.

Of course, the plan had been to refurbish the bridge in one season through funds acquired from Historic Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Our efforts were stymied by our inability to engage with our neighbours on the management plan our team had designed. With a deed of servitude over the bridge, our neighbours agreement to the plan was critical to the granting of funds of £750,000. As it is we have managed a programme, funded privately by the ScottishLaird project, which has achieved a great deal, but in a piece-meal fashion.

Volunteers in 2019

Our Jammers have been a Revelation!

Having said all that, working on the structure in this episodic manner has been a blast – not only because I have developed skills I never thought I’d need (rope-work, lime mortar mixing and scaffolding), but we have been introduced to some of the loveliest heritage fanatics – sorry, jammers – one could ever hope to meet (Brian, Lindy, Richard and Holly, I am looking at you!!).

With help from volunteers from SPAB and Historic Scotland during weekends either side of each sessions, we think we may even get a shot at repointing the ‘softer’ north face of the bridge (sounds like North Face of the Eiger doesn’t it?). This will then leave the main arch and the bottoms of the stanchions for 2022 – although whether we will have to engage a professional team for this as well, we are not sure. However we progress though, we wouldn’t have managed to get so far with the bridge without our volunteers!

… and the Castle!

But of course for 2021, the bridge isn’t the only story, and in the livestream I showed our jammers (and some Lairds and Ladies) into the main turret of the castle. This 4m circular tower was designed to be capped by a huge candle-snuffer conical slate roof, and the project for next year will be to repair the apertures, consolidate the doorways and, perhaps, work on the circular parapet at the top of the tower. I am hopeful that by the time the jammers get to it, we will have floors and temporary stairs all the way up the inside of the turret! Should make for a really memorable project!

Both Eland and Nigel are lined up to come back – and looking forward to meeting lots of new faces (and some familiar ones too!) And we are also back at the very popular HomeFarm Cottages with all of our preferred apartments.

I’ll be running the excursions again (because I really enjoyed them last time) and Anne and Sadie will be on hand to make sure you are all fed and I don’t eat more than my fair share.

For more details on the ScottishLaird project please click here.

For more details on Adventures in Preservation, please click here.

Dunans Castle Clearance Continues in Kitchen & Library: More Images

The clearance of the back two compartments of the castle has taken much longer than the others, simply because they aren’t accessible by the minidigger and there’s not enough room for more than a couple of workers. Our luck continues with the floors, which are all concrete, making clearance much much easier than suspended floors.

If you want to help with castle or bridge we have two volunteer fortnights in May 2020 and September 2020 – available here.

Archive for Lairds and Ladies: Surveys, Plans, Drawings and Notes are all available for members of the Lairds’ and Ladies’ site

Much of the work that has been undertaken this year by our professional team has been funded by all the titles and merchandise that have been purchased through the Scottish Laird project. The archive we are publishing on the Lairds’ and Ladies’ site is a detailed record of the outputs of that work. There are drawings for works on the bridge, preparatory sketches of the plans for the castle, fly-bys from laser surveys (like the image above) and much else besides.

A preview of the present list is shown below and is available to members of the site here.

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Our #Indiegogo #Campaign Kicks Off: Let’s Restore Historic Dunans Bridge

So very excited to launch our Crowdsource funding campaign today on Indiegogo, with a great video and lots of super pics.

DunansBridgeVideo1Screengrab

 

Here’s the text of our Press Release:

Dunans Bridge Bicentenary Restoration takes huge step forward

New IndieGogo Campaign to Restore A-listed, Thomas-Telford-designed, Dunans Bridge

Today sees the launch of a crowdfund campaign to accelerate the restoration of one of Argyll’s architectural jewels, the 16m (45ft) high Dunans Bridge in Glendaruel, Cowal. The bridge which gives access to B-Listed Dunans Castle and crosses Argyll’s-own “Grand Canyon”, the Chaol Ghleann gorge, is in need of serious repair, and is the first stage in the recently published Conservation Plan for Dunans written by eminent conservation architect Robin Kent, which culminates in the restoration of B-listed Dunans Castle in 2019 into a public building with Visitor Centre, Event space and Lairds’ and Ladies’ accommodation.

Over the last six months the team at Dunans has been working through the preliminaries to get the restoration of the bridge going, including producing drawings, defining specifications, undertaking investigatory works and clearing vegetation. The bridge is now ready for the works, and these works need to happen urgently.

As Charles says, “We’re hoping to gift the bridge the best 200th birthday present it could possibly get – a complete restoration. Sadie and myself are very excited to think that in 8 or 9 months time, the bridge’s future will be assured and we can celebrate our achievement with a huge Bridge Birthday celebration!”

Grant-funding applications are being made for this project by the Dunans Charitable Trust to Historic Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund, but because funding streams are never certain, Charles and Sadie Dixon-Spain decided that an Indiegogo campaign would be the ideal way of raising the profile of the bridge and also raising funds for the restoration and events programme that will be delivered alongside the works.

Culminating in a Bridge party in late summer 2015, the works will last between 6 and 8 months, and restore the bridge to a pristine state in its bicentenary year. The 200th anniversary of Thomas Telford completing the bridge is worth celebrating in itself, and preparing the bridge for a further 200 years of service is a fitting gift to the structure.

The IndieGogo campaign will also mark the first and only time that the title Laird or Lady of Dunans Bridge will be available. As a perk of contributing to the campaign, the title, and sundry other benefits, like scarves, ties and personalised email addresses, will be augmented with a permanent record of the names of Contributors, online, by the Bridge and, once restored, inside the castle too.

The page for our Indiegogo campaign is http://igg.me/at/dunans-bridge

Charles and Sadie, along with the team at Dunans, have been working tirelessly over the last few years, particularly since the beginning of the Scottishlaird Project in December 2007 to restore Castle and Bridge. With over 120,000 Lairds and Ladies now supporting the project, and providing over 5,000 visits* to the site in 2014 alone, this campaign has every chance of reaching its target of £411,600 as well as making a significant and lasting contribution to the local and regional economy.

*VisitScotland figures show that these 5,000 visits are worth a total of £2M to the local economy, with visits to Dunans being the primary motivation behind the visitors trip to Argyll (from within the UK) and Scotland (for our international Lairds and Ladies)

 

Finalised Interpretation at Dunans with Pictures of Walltop Clearance last October

IMG_0146This morning, having finally signed off on the coding work I’d been doing to make the ScottishLaird production process more efficient, I went back to the third of our lectern slides, wanting to increase the variety of pictures we’d used. It occurred to me to look out the pictures of Browns of Strone working on the walltops.

IMG_0148To my shame I did not take a useable photo of the cherry-picker entirely extended (wanting to actually get on the thing and see the castle from a different angle), but I did have this sequence, which shows the guys making their first ‘ascent’ up the North face of the castle (makes it sound like mountaineering doesn’t it?).

Anyway, I thought I’d share the photos as only two of them will get used on the signage.

And finally below is the jpeg of the sign as it will be printed, with all the crop marks, bleeds and artworks in place. It’ll look great on the third of Mike’s lecterns and adorn the drive apron in front of the castle.

contribution-sign

ScottishLaird: The Story So Far … A New Sign for the Castle

The third sign in our growing collection of lectern interpretation tells the story of how ScottishLaird has developed from a small idea into a castle-saving enterprise. The draft sign, pictured below – and in part, above – will be printed at the end of the week, once I have properly proofed the whole design.

I’ve also included the text of the sign as its a great summary of how the Scottish Laird project has developed …

lectern-scottishlaird

DRAFT TEXT
Please note that this text is subject to change, not only because we will be editing it for the first printing of the sign, but because as we develop our ideas with regard to both the end use of the castle and the method we’ll use to effect the restoration, the narrative will perforce change. Not only that, over the next year or two we’ll encounter some pretty big decision points which may affect both absolute progress and our timetable.

The Scottish Laird Project
Since 1st December 2007, when the Scottish Laird Project began, over 100,000 Lairds and Ladies have taken up the offer to support the project to restore Dunans Castle, the bridge and grounds. The project has Lairds and Ladies from all over the world, including countries where Scots have emigated to, like the US, Canada and Australia, as well as regions which evidently feels kinship through climate, location and topography, like Norway, Sweden and Denmark. All are welcome, both to enjoy our decorative titles, but also, and most importantly to visit Dunans, in person or via the internet, and learn about the restoration.

The intention was always to create a community of interest around the castle, while also providing a fun and original gift idea. We hope we have been successful in the latter, but know from our tours and feedback online, that the community is a thriving, engaged and above all, interested stakeholder in what we do at Dunans.

By necessity the Lairds and Ladies contributions were small to begin with. The maintenance of paths, the creation of signage, the planting of trees and the management of the policies in general. With contributions from the project in the first 4 years we’ve improved steps, created benches, repaired the worst of nature’s depredations and ensured that year round we can work on improving our visitor experience.

Harrods, WHSmith et al.
One of our early successes in getting the project to a larger audience was our involvement with Gift Republic, a distributor with connections across the globe, and in particular, in high streets across the US and the UK. We immediately saw a significant hike in folks becoming involved in the project, particularly with the introduction of titles to the likes of Harrods and WHSmith. Gift Republic also helped us make our tours a regular fixture during the summer, with 2011 bringing over a thousand Lairds and Ladies to Dunans.

A Great Leap Forward
In early 2012 the project took another great leap forward with the first of our many offers via Groupon. That year, while providing tours for over two and a half thousand people, we were able to invest in a more thorough-going grounds management policy, investing both in plant and drainage.

It was at this stage we realised that the project needed its own office space, and moved everything to our specially-built, but temporary, green shed (you’ll have seen it as you arrived, partially screened by Rhododendron and Rowan). Since late 2012 this has been centre of operations for Scottish Laird.

Creating a Conservation Plan
By the end of that year it became obvious that our increasing success meant we were going to be in a position to move the project forward in more definite terms for both castle and bridge. We started looking for an architect to help us. By the middle of 2013 we’d found architect and conservation specialist Robin Kent, and since then he has been working with us to realise plans which will encapsulate both our vision for Dunans, and that expressed to us by the Lairds and Ladies when they visited.

Our first task was to create a structure around which we could create a timescale and a budget for the renovations, one which would also answer to the method we’d use. Robin therefore began work on a Conservation Plan for Dunans, and over the winter of 2013/14 produced a document with which we could base our planning and listed building consents. The plan was published in April 2014 as a book for consultation with our Lairds and Ladies.

Preparing the Ground
To date this work – the creation of the Conservation Plan, the professional input from Structural Engineer and Quantity Surveyor, the ongoing meetings with planners, the clearing of the castle wall-tops and much else besides – has been paid for by the project.

In a similar way in the second half of 2014 the Laird project with be financing two major preparatory works: firstly, the bridge will be subject to a detailed examination with trial pits being dug to ascertain the level of intervention the structure requires; and secondly, we will be engaging a team of clearance experts to take all the detritus from the castle. Like the trial pits for the bridge, clearing the castle is an essential prerequisite – in this case for the detailed surveys we will need to create the drawings for applications to the local planning department as well as Historic Scotland.

The Bridge’s Birthday Party
During 2015, its bicentennial, the bridge will be restored, but because it is an A-listed structure, we hope to obtain full funding from Historic Scotland and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Includingwithin the £1M total funding package will be a 5% contribution from Scottish Laird to enable a complete record of the works to be made, as well as a programme of celebrations and events around the restoration of the structure. Local Schools, History and Archaeology Groups, Lairds and Ladies will all be involved in what will prove to be a really significant moment in the life of the site and the project.

With the funding in place for the restoration of the bridge (and it is by no means certain) we will then be in a position to start the works on the castle by early 2016. And it is this work which the ScottishLaird Project will have been most instrumental in funding.

Restoring the Castle
As the Conservation Plan for Dunans shows the indicative budget for a restoration of the castle into a mixed-use visitor attraction and accommodation venue is £4M. This figure would not have been achievable without the credibility the Scottish Laird project lends the site. We anticipate that given good financial results for the year 2014-15, and continuing success in marketing both our titles and the associated merchandise, we will be able to borrow the £2.5M we will need to complete the project.

The programme of works, as the timeline above indicates, will take approximately 3 years, and finish around April 2019 – all things having occurred as envisaged. In that time, we’ll have worked on the castle in two distinct phases: first, the recovery and second, the renovation.

The Recovery
In the recovery phase, beginning with the preparatory works already mentioned, the castle will be cleared, the walls, gables, chimneys and wall-tops will be consolidated. The structure will then be roofed. We did consider a temporary roof, but we felt that this was an added and needless expense. Once roofed the castle would be fenestrated and then left for c. 18 months to dry out. It may be that during this time it will be necessary to create floors in the space. Of course once roofed and drying it may be possible to hold events in the structure.

The Restoration
Taking approximately a year, the restoration will bring in services, first and second fix, all the appurtenances of a modern visitor attraction, as well as the facilities on the first and second storeys to cater for guests. We will of course include sustainable energy sources where possible – microhydro and photovoltaics being favoured at the time of writing.

Once completed, our Lairds and Ladies will be able to stay in one of three gorgeous self-catering apartments in the Castle, and enjoy visitor facilities, like a restaurant/cafe, an archive room, a Castle shop and, of course, the lovely grounds. By the time the project is completed we will have created together a sustainable castle which will maintain itself for generations to come.

CSDS, July 2014 

Working on the 5 year plan for @DunansCastle today and the big news is … we can do it!

The picture that heads this post shows the 5 year cashflow for restoring the castle. I’ve been working out how the financial demands for the work on the project can be catered for utilising a mix of income from Scottishlaird, grant-funding and finance. The figures show it is possible at present levels, but it would be much more comfortable if the ScottishLaird project kept expanding at its current rate (of course!).

The reason we’re looking at this now is that we will soon know whether the bridge restoration project, led by the Dunans Charitable Trust, will get funding – this is effectively the ‘go’ button for the entire site and will lock us into a five year process that will mean we’ll open the building for visitors sometime early in 2019.

Obviously there are some critical stop/go moments. The grant-funding is one, listed building consent is another, loan finance yet another, but if there is anything I have learned from working with CGDT over the years, is that any project, large or small, is unstoppable once it gets momentum.

So now that the cashflow is roughed out, the next step is to put together plans for how the ScottishLaird project will maintain its momentum, continuing to sell decorative titles and also all the other products which will help to restore out Highland Castle. We’re looking at mugs, calendars, garments and more books (of course), but more excitingly (for techheads like me) we’re considering a game for smartphones – considering only at the moment, but given the revenues generated in the casual gaming market at present, this could represent a huge opportunity.

All I am wondering now is, what type of game should it be? A Castle restoration sim perhaps? Or maybe that’s too close to the bone?

But first the 5 year plan – and here’s the gant chart it’ll be based on!

draft-timeline

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