On track to open two remarkable buildings Landmark News WINTER 2017-18 LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR TANGY Mill TRANSFORMED DESPitE thE ELEMENTS Drookit, a Scottish adjective meaning Staying true to the building’s working extremely wet or absolutely drenched, best past, yet keeping abreast of modern described the weather in the final throes technological developments, we plan to of our recent refurbishment of Tangy install a ground source heat pump and Mill in Kintyre. It made work especially a hydroelectric generator, reviving the challenging for Duncan McLean, a local Mill’s use of Tangy Burn as its source contractor who led the work to improve of energy. the building’s insulation, insert extra From Kintyre you can hop onto local glazing and install a new heating system. ferries for day trips and explore the We’ve also added a bathroom and created whisky distilleries, beaches and walks a double bedroom. Tangy Mill was built of this beautiful coastline. Tangy Mill in about 1820 to grind the oats grown by has just reopened to guests, having local farmers and coincidentally Duncan been fully redecorated as part of the is the son of one such farmer. He has refurbishment, making it warm and Dear Friends, childhood memories of his father taking cosy, whatever the weather. The coming year is going to be a bumper oats up to the Mill. one for Landmark - 12 months in which, • Sleeps up to 6 people in two The former watermill is a rare, atmospheric remarkably, we hope to be ‘on-site’ with double bedrooms and one and rather fun place in which to spend a five building projects, something of a twin room record in recent times. holiday. Its setting is blissfully remote, and • Prices start from £23 per inside the original hoisting and grinding person per night We are now entering the thrilling final machinery has been preserved, integrated • A short flight or 4 hour drive stages with two buildings. In Snowdonia, carefully with the familiar comfort of from Glasgow the long programme at Coed y Bleddiau Landmark’s living accommodation. is coming to an end as the snows descend. When I visited recently it was a thrill to see how much the team there had managed to salvage of the original fabric. In the tiny kitchen the Victorian range has been brought back into action, ready to receive fires again, complemented by simple modern fittings made in Landmark’s own workshop. Meanwhile in Monmouthshire Llwyn Celyn is nearing completion, and we hope to open that remarkable building early in the autumn. As the teams hang up their hard hats on these two projects, elsewhere work will be beginning, including at Cobham Dairy and Dunshay Manor. 2018 will also see a new edition of our famous Handbook. We want to ensure we make the most of this cherished publication and will be running a survey to inform our plans, so if you have views on this Landmark institution please do let us know through a short survey that will be open until 4 February at www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/LTHB2018 Wishing you all a wonderful 2018 and thank you, once again, for your support. Dr Anna Keay, Director Tangy Mill near the beautiful Kintyre coast is cosier than ever 2 LANDMARK NEWS WINTER 2017-18 LANDMARK NEWS WINTER 2017-18 3 Landmarkers can travel to Coed y Bleiddiau, which means ‘wood of the wolves’, by steam train - just as building materials have done. COED Y BLEiddiaU SET FOR APRIL OPENING We’re thrilled that charming Coed wills. Many thanks also to the Ffestiniog y Bleiddiau will open this April. Bookings “No one who stayed and Welsh Highland Railway Trust, from will be released early in the spring, and at Coed y Bleiddiau whom we’ve taken a long lease, and who this new Landmark sleeps up to four were instrumental in helping us transport people, costing from £240 for four nights, was anything but materials to this remote site. equivalent to £15 per person per night. It’s a magical Landmark, not just a Landmarkers will park twenty minutes’ happy there.” fragment of a bygone age, but one with walk away or more fittingly arrive by steam Myrrah Bantock (Sir Granville contemporary resonance: Welsh narrow train at the cottage’s own little platform. Bantock’s daughter) gauge railways such as Ffestiniog were Eighteen months of repair and restoration immortalised in the children’s TV classic in all seasons by stalwart local specialist When we embarked upon the project, the Ivor the Engine, and the railway is today a builder Mark Roberts and his team building was in a dilapidated state, having popular tourist attraction. A break in this have revitalised this former railway stood empty for 10 years. Steered by our idyllic spot on the slopes of the hillside, superintendent’s cottage on the Ffestiniog surveyor for the West Midlands and Wales, periodically interrupted by the nostalgic Railway. It was built in 1863, almost Richard Burton, the team undertook the puff and toot of a passing train, is a world halfway along the 40-mile stretch of painstaking process of repairing original away from the overcrowded industrial narrow gauge track railway which carried joinery, retaining timber which might towns and cities which once relied upon its slate from Blaenau Ffestiniog, once the have been condemned as beyond repair. slate for housing and factories. largest slate mine in the world, down The Victorian porch was repaired and to Porthmadog harbour where it was the new kitchen made by our brilliant Bookings will be released at 9am on: distributed worldwide. craftsmen, Mark Smitten and Luke Rose, whilst furnishings manager John Evetts 13 February to Guardians of As the slate industry declined, Coed y has been planning how to best evoke the Coed y Bleddiau by phone Bleiddiau’s life as a holiday cottage began. cottage’s rich history through its interior 20 February to Patrons online and The flamboyant composer and conductor decoration. by phone of the City of Birmingham Symphony 24 February to Friends online and Orchestra, Sir Granville Bantock, rented We are very grateful to the 2,152 supporters 26 February to Friends by phone the cottage with his family between 1922 who contributed to the fundraising and 1937, its peaceful setting inspiring appeal for £480,000, including generous 3 March to Everyone online his compositions. Guardians, Patrons, trusts and gifts in 2 LANDMARK NEWS WINTER 2017-18 LANDMARK NEWS WINTER 2017-18 3 INDUSTRIAL HERitaGE REINVENTED Coed y Bleiddiau is the first industrial building we’ve revitalised since we announced our plan to target particularly at-risk building types; 20th-century military structures, seaside and leisure buildings, transport and communications structures, unchanged rural domestic houses and crofts, buildings whose restoration may contribute to urban regeneration and, small and significant industrial buildings. Of course Landmark has always pioneered the rescue of neglected buildings. Indeed it was the destruction of Thomas Telford’s Junction House on the Shropshire Union canal (at a time when the preservation of industrial buildings was acutely unfashionable) which sparked the creation of the Landmark Trust. To this day we believe all sorts of buildings, including unconventional ones, make wonderful places to stay. Here are a few of our favourite industrial Landmarks. We’ve recorded a five minute podcast about the history and restoration of each one, which you can listen to on our website www.landmarktrust.org.uk/industry Built in 1776 at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, If you know of any endangered buildings NORth STREET in Cromford, Derbyshire, is the earliest that would make a super Landmark please example of industrial housing, where Richard Arkwright’s mill contact our historian Caroline Stanford at workers lived (and often worked). Fortunately it was saved from [email protected] demolition in the 1960s and is now Grade I listed. Cromford itself is part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site. From £13 per person per night (pppn) An imaginative conversion has made DANESCOMBE MINE, the engine house of a former mine, a lovely and interesting Landmark. Standing by a stream in a steep wooded valley leading down to the Tamar in Cornwall, the mine worked on and off from 1822 to 1900. The living room leads onto wooden decking where you can sit out and overhear the stream running past the back door and wonder what life was like here a century ago. From £14 pppn 4 LANDMARK NEWS WINTER 2017-18 LANDMARK NEWS WINTER 2017-18 5 IRON BRIDGE HOUSE, Shropshire. This substantial In a loop of the River Coquet house overlooks the spectacular Severn gorge. It sits in a quiet wooded valley in right at the point where the world’s first iron bridge was Northumberland is BRINKBURN built. Iron Bridge House is an ideal base for exploring the MILL. It has a long working past, museums, sites and the beautiful landscape that provided having been built in about 1800 the wood, ore and water of this cradle of the Industrial near the site of its medieval Revolution. From £18pppn predecessor. The wheel and grinding stones remain, although long unused. An advertisement for a miller was placed in the Newcastle Chronicle in January 1813 and a decade later the Mill was painted by JMW Turner. From £18pppn STOKEr’S COttAGE, outside Cambridge, is a simple and evocative cottage built to serve one of the monumental pumping engines that sprang up as the Steam Age took on the challenge of draining the Fenland. Our Landmark is the modest home once lived in by the first stoker, Mr Murfitt, who held the position from 1855 to 1900.