Thanks to funding secured from Natural England under the Higher Level Stewardship Scheme (HLS), Dartington has started initial work to repair and conserve the historic 18th century Grade 11 listed Deer Park Wall on the estate.
Dartington’s Deer Park area is officially designated as being heritage at risk and considerable work is needed to preserve its future.
This initial ‘Phase 1’ work, overseen by building conservation specialists Philip Hughes Associates and SSHConservation, started this month (in February) and will continue for approximately three months. This relatively small first phase of work is addressing some of the highest priority areas of the wall needing work.
Dartington has applied for funding to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Viridor Credits Environmental Company in order to undertake a much bigger project in the Deer Park which would start later this year – repairing and conserving the rest of the Deer Park Wall, enhancing physical access to the area with improved paths and signage, and a range of related activities to encourage public understanding and engagement in this beautiful and relatively unknown historic part of the Dartington Hall estate.
The project would create a new outdoor learning programme for primary schools in the region and create a number of new volunteering roles, including volunteer Deer Park guides to escort the public in the area.
HLF announced their initial support for Dartington’s grant application back in July last year and both HLF and Viridor Credits are expected to make final decisions on Dartington’s grant applications by the end of March. Both organisations undertook encouraging site visits in February to review the project and meet the Dartington team.
We are very happy to announce that Marc Pique Gascon has been awarded an MSc in the Conservation of Historic Buildings . Marc qualified as an architect in Barcelona in 2011 and has recently been accepted as a member of the RIBA. He has worked with PHA for over three years and is a very valued member of the team.
Lovely to see such a project underway, but almost impossible to see from the map you provide where it is going to be. Dartington Hall is at the bottom of the map, and visitors centre is marked, but as it’s such a restricted area, I can’t see any road or get bearings to understand which direction the deer park is. Can you provide a larger map please showing where the deer park is in relation to the roads through the estate? Thanks!
Hi Jane, thanks for pointing this out – we will try to do this but in the meantime if you click here you can see our estate map which should help you get your bearings. Things have moved on signficantly from the above story now, and we have posted several more recent updates. You can see the most recent one here – as you’ll see, we are running a major campaign at the moment for the last bit of funding to make the Deer Park happen so do take a look if you’re interested! On our website homepage we also have a projects section halfway down the page which is the best place to go for the latest updates on major stuff happening here.