The new Blackden Trust website went live in October.

In a normal year, we close down the site for winter and put on events in other venues during this month, but Coronavirus restrictions have prevented any events this year. The only Trust activities have been routine management and maintenance.

There were two maintenance visits. One was from the builder, whose roofers came in August.  He came to assess the roof of Toad Hall.  The other was from a restoration engineer, who had been booked to come in March, but lockdown delayed his visit.  He came to assess why a leak had appeared in the cellar of the Old Medicine House, and how to prevent it from happening again.

The cellar is a multi-purpose space where we store catering equipment and supplies; educational resources; and archaeological material, some of which is sensitive to damp. Luckily, more volunteers than usual were here on the day in March that the leak was discovered.  They lifted everything off the floor and onto higher surfaces.  Sensitive objects, including the wall paintings that we found when the house was dismantled at Wrinehill, were taken upstairs and carefully laid on the floor of the wing.

The next day, the Friends of The Blackden Trust annual lecture had to be cancelled. Three days later the Trustees closed the site.  The following week, the first national lockdown started.

Finally, seven months later, the restoration engineer was able to come, by which time the cellar was dry. A leak in the cellar had first appeared forty-eight years ago, when the rebuilding of the Old Medicine House was just completed. It was cured by putting in a drain below the level of the floor to take the water away from the area. As the engineer was looking for a possible cause for the leak, he noticed that some of the flag stones of the path round the outside of the cellar wall had holes in them.

‘Why?’ he asked.

Water was flowing through them and eroding the sand below. They should be filled in. Griselda explained that they were roof slabs and the holes were for roofing pegs; and because our educational workshops turn on the students using their skills of observation and deduction, those holed slabs were an educational resource.

‘Then you must keep them,’ he said, ‘Just plug them with mastic.’ He had been a police detective for thirty years and had reason to value those skills of observation and deduction.