Name: Conservation in Action: Reculver Towers and Roman Fort
Uploaded: 2025-10-25T18:45:49.000Z
Duration: 4 min 33 s
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It's a national significance because it represents continuity through a great amount of time.

So its origins lie in the late second century, but

within it a church was established here in the mid 7th century.

The Saxons Minster and that Saxon minster was the parish church of a community.

And in fact that community survived in this location until the early 19th century when coastal change and heavy erosion meant the site was no longer tenable.

The church was partially ruined, but the towers were kept as a navigational aid.

We started work on site back in May and we're due to finish in November.

All the works that been very carefully considered.

We're very fortunate to have an excellent team of people all working together collaboratively.

We have a team of five number masons, four carpentry and lead work specialists, three window specialists and two man safe contractors.

We've been undertaking a multi phase project here at Recolva, starting with the walls of the Roman fort and then we moved inside the fort to deal with the church.

And we started with the most urgent areas of historic fabric.

We designed a scaffold plan and gave very careful consideration to that to make sure the scaffolding was robust, that could withstand the wind speeds that we get here.

The location of the site means that it's exposed to really extreme weather conditions and that's led to a lot of erosion on the motor faces.

And it's really kind of getting to the point now where there's kind of a big kind of amount of repairs that need to be carried out again.

And certainly one of the things that English Heritage I know are looking at is kind of dealing with the coastal erosion, with climate change moving along and as well it's something that needs to be considered.

The process of the thicken of the walls is where the weather just pounds and the rain just makes the walls really thin.

So in some parts you can even see daylight through them.

So we're trying to thicken them out with flint, pebbles, ragstone.

So basically you find a very deep area, you hand pick a pebble so you apply the mortar and then you lay it in the mortars and then basically with the same mortar point around it.

There's a variety of different stones that were originally in the building, so some Roman brick as well, from the original Roman forbes.

As part of the exercise, we have tried to match the stones to the original materials wherever it's possible.

Looking at the towers themselves, a lot of the masonry you can see was salvaged from the original Roman building.

A lot of the medieval buildings that are near the coast, the mortars are formed with aggregate taken from the beaches, so crushed shell, crushed oyster shell, cockle shell.

So replicating the mix closely is very important.

The process is to point it, let it sit a bit, let a crust go on it, brush, brush the crust off and it brings all the aggregates out and it looks authentic.

In the roof works, we came across additional rot that we hadn't expected to kind of find in the initial assessment.

So that's meant removing the old roof structure and replacing with a new timber deck that's gone in, but

Any rain that will run off, drip down and drip free of the facade, which then protects the stonework and all the restoration work they're doing today.

I started roofing when I was 13 years old with my dad, third generation.

My grandfather owned the company and my father owned the company.

Now I own the company with my two brothers.

So we found that house sparrows were nesting in small holes across the masonry, and

we've erected a number of artificial nest boxes on site, which they're currently using, I'm pleased to say.

Recolva Towers have been a really very dramatic landscape feature on this part of the North Ken coast since the early 13th century.

And as a consequence of the work we're carrying out at the moment, we're confident that they will remain a landscape feature for many generations to come.