Name: Conservation in Action: Baconsthorpe Castle
Uploaded: 2025-07-25T18:21:21.000Z
Duration: 2 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Bakershaw Castle is a wonderful historic site.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

It's linked to the very influential Hayden family, who built Bakershaw Castle in about 1450.

They started off as lawyers, but then moved into the wool industry. 200 years later, mounting debts meant they had to sell off bits of the castle, and that started the ruin as we see now.

Bakershaw Castle is subject to an awful lot more wear than a normal building would be.

When it rains, it tends to fall on top of the exposed walls, and over time, this can erode the mortar which is holding the stones together, and then the pieces start to fall off.

You can end up with quite a little garden on top, and as they grow, they expand and they push the masonry outwards.

We've been removing the vegetation, clearing out the joints, and then renewing the mortar with the lime-based mortar.

All the flint that would have been here would have been locally found, so we've been sourcing all the stuff that's fallen off the walls, but also going to local quarries.

Flint ruins can be more vulnerable because the cobbles are odd shapes.

Unlike stone masonry, where you've got square blocks and they're still stable, with flints that doesn't happen.

If the mortar goes, then the flints become loose very easily, and can easily drop out.

The vault, which is underneath the gatehouse, is missing quite a few pieces of very important stonework, which keeps it stable.

So we need to make sure that the vault acts as a proper support for the wall above it.

This is a major project, but it's still going to be a ruin, so we have to balance how far we go.

But the idea is that we get it to such a state that we know it's safe and secure, and then we can build in a regular monitoring process to help us look after these ruins for many, many years to come.