Forest of Dean Local History Society
The Foresters Forest was a project funded by the National Lottery with the purpose of increasing awareness about the Forest of Dean. The project came to an end in March 2022, but many of the resources and information have been passed to the Forest of Dean Local History Society. One of the Foresters Forest Projects was supporting built heritage and focussed on small-scale conservation works on a number of industrial heritage sites in the Forest.
This project involved maintenance and repair of these sites, as well as ensuring that they are recorded properly to protect them in future.
What did the project deliver?
In order to develop the project, a Built Heritage Strategy has been created which reviewed existing sources of information, spoke to those with an interest in built heritage, scored selected sites against criteria to assess their relative importance, visited a sample of sites and provided estimates of costed works for the sub-set of specific sites that could be worked on in the delivery stage.
As well as using an appropriate contractor to complete conservation works on sites, there is also a need for a contractor to train local volunteers so that they have the necessary skills to perform small-scale maintenance and repair on some built heritage structures (e.g. removing vegetation, using lime mortar to repair some structures). It is anticipated that some of the sites identified during the Built Heritage project might need to be listed or scheduled, in accordance with their importance, to protect them in future.