Aisling Byron: Architectural conservation work at Fota House
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She describes the purpose of some of the rooms and of the layout of the house. She comments on the difference between conservation work and renovation work, emphasizing the former. She notes the social divide between staff and Big House families, and how that was reflected in the physical structure of the house at Fota. She gives some examples of the practical work she undertook inside the house.
Note: this interview was recorded as part of the audio track to accompany the DVD entitled If The Stones Could Speak.
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Well this is the drawing room and this was one of the worstly effected building or rooms in the building because as you can see there was partial collapse of the ceiling here, and behind all this, I don’t know if the possibly, don’t know the construction of lath plaster ceilings, basically, even though, this area here was the area that had fallen, the whole rest of the ceiling was very weak at that point as well, because the way that the base of the ceiling would be first put in place is you get your joists crossing the entire ceiling and on top of that, I put laths and laths of timber that would perhaps be about one inch in thickness, they vary, they don’t have to be very particular, and there then nailed, from this side of the room, and so if you can imagine these are spread out then at intervals, maybe of half an inch and from this side the plaster is pushed up into the laths and as the plaster ceases the laths and as the plaster is pushed up this is a piece of plaster now it falls up and curls over and forms a little ‘U’, which is known as a nib, and quiet often in old buildings like that, the nibs actually break, they break at the line of the lath, so this whole, this whole building, this whole ceiling was very, very, weak. So even though this is the area that looked damaged the entire thing had to be from the other side the floor boards lifted and all the nibs prepared. This had fallen in one piece but as it hit the floor it smashed considerably so.