Rock of Cashel stone conservation restoration
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At that rate it would be just as well to take the train down to Eurodisney! After all, that is what the OPW is turninh the Rock of Cashel into.
Muckross Abbey, currently under conservation
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Look at the stone face in the foreground, then the conserved face in the background behind the scaffold. Is it an optical illusion?
Tell me this is temporary.
How temporary?
Temporary as in however long it takes for the stone to weather to its previous state. How long it takes for this to happen, I’m not sure.
What do you all make of this? The video is critical of the OPW’s ‘restoration’ and touristification of Skellig Michael;
I wonder does this explain the mess that the OPW is making of the Rocak of Cashel and elsewhere?
great article prax thanks. The most relevant part perhaps;
“Contractors have to open their doors to trainees and customers need to demand it. At the moment, the cheapest quote wins and the cheapest contractors are the ones who don’t spend money on training.
“Gradually, this lowers the skill level across the board until the historic fabric starts to suffer.”
The problem must be much worse here than in England, for obvious reasons. I wonder are the same solutions being pursued?
Here you’ll find a very detailed extensive article on excavations on the Rock of Cashel, focusing on Cormac’s Chapel,with much interesting information.
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~dunamase/Dunamase.html
Also, quite a bit of info on excavations around the country is found here on the heritage council’s site, ;
http://www.heritagecouncil.ie/archaeology/unpublished_excavations/section2.html
This should give the new stone a bit of weathering;
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Just put in search for cashel in flickr.com and choose most recent- there are pages and pages of great shots of the Cashel Skyfest event.
Fascinating thread; my one visit to Cashel left me in a real quandary.
(1) The cathedral was deliberately unroofed in the 18th C and was subsequently affected by weathering (leading to the partial collapse of the east gable). Is it appropriate to treat the vandalism of the 18th C as the terminal defined state of the building?
(2) Cormac’s Chapel was a grave disappointment; it is a gem, but a sadly neglected one and all the pictures amply demonstrate this.
(3) In the same vein, the illustrations of Ardfert beg one very important question: why is it not reroofed and brought back into use (as a communal building if not a church, though the latter would be the obvious use)?
What is the resistance to restoration and re-use? Is the Venice protocol (or whatever it’s called) simply a form of PC usage for conservators? Isn’t the best preservative of a building its being in use and maintained? AWN Pugin (no less) could not understand why he was being asked to build new churches in Co. Wexford when there were so many historic buildings waiting to be brought back into use. Better an imperfect (though not Disney-esque) restoration than an absolutely PC ‘conservation’ that amounts to decay and neglect (or the abortion posing as one wall of Limerick castle!).johnglas, I’m with you for once on this (except Cashel which makes a great ruin). The Venice Charter, the Burra Charter etc., these international declarations on conservation are really aimed at middle east dictators rebuilding ziggurats. When you apply them to more ordinary examples of our heritage, are you not detaching us from the heritage that we’re trying to connect to?
I think it’s the Burra Charter that has this huge contradiction in it, that modification and alterations to a monument, over centuries, becomes the monument and should not be stripped back to reveal a pristine ‘original’, but further modification, from our time, that’s out of order!
That line of logic, in my opinion, draws an artificial line between the past and the present. The present, after all, is just a transient notation between the past and more of the past.
Wasn’t there a good old Scottish rumpus about the re-rendering of the great hall at Sterling Castle, a fews years back, is this over now, or is it still rumbling on?
wow cashel looks amazing there….there was a pretty cool light show on too…parts of it look like a bit like trailing christmas lights….but there’s some amazing silhouette shots http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKX3xOGUzYw
Gunter: thanks for that; aye, there was indeed a great stooshie (rumpus) over Stirling Castle, mainly because the Great Hall was fully restored and paintedbright yellow (!) – to say that it acts like a beacon over the floodplain of the Forth is putting it mildly. Stirling Castle, magnificent as it is, glowers over its surroundings; it is not a bright building, so painful thumbs come to mind. Still, it’s done and I’ve not heard much about it recently.
These various charters and protocols strike me as dogma masquerading as good practice; the agenda is normally hijacked by a few enthusuaists who lay down the rules and then cry foul when they are not adhered to.
Still, all fashion passes and who knows what will be the convention in a few years’ time.
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