When Dunster Castle Got a New Roof

Earlier today I went to Dunster - a thing I often do as my daughter Nancy lives there - and also I have just written a children’s story with the working title A Dunster Fairy Tale… Anyway, waiting at the traffic lights today i was looking up at the famous castle and recalling the day in August 2006 when I climbed onto it’s mighty roof which was being restored by the National Trust at huge cost…

Here’s the article I wrote at the time, with some of the photos I took…

The works underway at Dunster Castle in 2006

Sooner or later most homeowners experience trouble with the thing that keeps the weather out and quickly find out that mending their roof can be complex and costly. So imagine the nightmare of replacing the roof of one of the West Country’s biggest castles…

That’s exactly what the National Trust is doing at Dunster Castle and the statistics involved are enormous. Laid end to end the scaffolding poles being used to tackle the job would stretch ten miles. So much scaffolding was required that the trust discovered it would be cheaper to buy its own rather than rent the stuff from contractors.

The area of roof to be repaired is the same size as two tennis courts. Workers will have to drag 13.5 tonnes of lead up the 20 metres high scaffold – that’s nearly the weight of a double-decker bus. They will be protected from the wind and rain by the scaffold awning, which spans a giant 25 metres.

And so impressive is all this that the trust is planning to introduce special tours of the roof-works starting within the next month. 

I was given a preliminary trip around of the scaffold-clad battlements this week, and an impressive feat of engineering the structure is. The first thing you learn is that the Luttrell family, who owned the castle for centuries before giving it to the National Trust, suffered what may have been a lapse in judgement sometime back in the 19th century.

Listening to house manager Jonathon White describe what happened, you can somehow imagine a situation similar to that which existed between Basil Fawlty and O’Reilly the dodgy builder in the famous Fawlty Towers programme. 

“During the 19th century a pitched roof was introduced and the work seems to have been quite poor,” says Mr White. “Ever since it has required repairs, but they have never really worked.

“Basically, the detailing of the work was very poor - the gutters didn’t run off properly, water tended to pool and the stonework started deteriorating. The problems are endless,” said Mr White as he showed me around the old male servant’s quarters perched in one of the towers. 

“We’ve got damp rot, dry rot, insect infestations, wallpaper coming off the walls, you name it,” he shrugged waving a hand at several badly decaying rooms. Large damp holes loomed in the ceilings and buckets were dotted about in attempt to catch dripping water.

“There are parts of the towers where you cannot walk on the floorboards,” sighed Mr White. “Basically we needed to get these things sorted out, but we couldn’t do that until we got the roof fixed. 

“We’d got to a point where the lead itself was so old and brittle it was going to deteriorate rapidly, so we were going to have to replace it all anyway. We decided it was a good time to go ahead and get the whole thing fixed once and for all.”

But this master-plan to solve Dunster Castle’s leaky problems won’t come cheap. 

“We don’t know how much the whole job will cost yet, because we don’t really know what’s up there,” Mr White told me. “There might be some really old structures in there - and we can’t go ahead until we know what exists. As soon as the scaffolding is finished, we will do an archaeological survey to find out what’s under the lead. 

“All we do know at the moment is how much the scaffolding costs (almost £250,000),” he added. “We bought it because it will be up for at least a year and we discovered it was cheaper to buy it than rent it. There’s a backlog of big jobs in National Trust properties across the country anyway, so it will be dismantled and used elsewhere.”

It’s believed the eventual bill for replacing the roof at the castle will be around half a million pounds. 

In the meantime the trust is keen that visitors know the castle is open for business as usual, despite the fact that more than half the building is clad in scaffold. 

“A couple of rooms are covered in protective sheeting but we have new interpretation panels to explain what is happening and we have opened a couple of little extra bits that visitors will not have seen before,” says Mr White.  

“We’ve also got the shutters closed down at the end of the castle that is surrounded by the scaffold awning, which has turned out quite well really,” said Mr White.  “That’s because you are seeing those particular rooms - like the billiard room and library - in the same sort of light in which they’d probably have been used. The Luttrells probably wouldn’t have gone into them until night time.”

Now the trust is planning to turn the massive roof-works into a visitor attraction in their own right. Tours will begin in September when guides will host tours up onto the top of the southwest wing. The scaffold has been specially designed with this in mind, with all sharp edges having been padded and a large stairway erected to get visitors to the top. 

Be warned however, that you will need to be relatively fit to make the climb and have a good head for heights.

Interior damage at the time the roof was leaking