 maintained good evening everyone and my apologies for anyone who's here to hear about Norwich because I don't know anything about Norwich at all so this evening we are going to be looking at the National Trust property of Knoel in Kent described by Virginia Woolf as more Town than House so it's one of the largest, if not the largest country house in England and I wanted to talk to you about some of the work has been underway there over the last 8 to 9 years by the National Trust. So just a quick overview. These are the principal owners of Nol from the mid 15th century onwards. We know from documentary sources that probably from maybe as early as the 13th century or the 14th century that there was something at Nol. We know that Thomas Bourget the Archbishop of Canterbury, roedd ydych chi'n gwybod yn 1456 oes bod y cyfnodol. Felly, mae'r cerdd yma yw'r ysgol. Yn ychydig ar y cyfnodol, yma'r cyfnodol, yma'r cyfnodol, byddwn yn ymgyrch, yn ymgyrch, yn ymgyrch yn y 1530, yn y gweithio Henry VIII, yma hefyd, yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, ac yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch, ac yn Thomas Cramner yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Rhaid i chi'n rhan o'r Palos Roedd, yn yr ystod y 17a dyn, oedd yn cyfnodd y Fflawn Thomas Sackfield yn yr Yrddorff Ddorsid a'r Fflawn Sackfield yn ei ddechrau ar gyfer y ddechrau, byddai chi'n ddona'r Fflawn, ond y Fflawn ac oedd 100 aelodau o'r Fflawn a'r Gfairfodol ar gyfer Gwlad Llywodraethol ar y ffordd, gan yna byddai cyrraeddiaeth ar gyfer y Ffordd 2. felly rydw i'n meddwl â lŷwm hynny mewn gwirionedd o'r ddod i'w lŷwm hynod. Fi allwch chi'n fydd ystod i bod thisudaeth sydd yn eu codi'r siaradau. Oni, oherwydd 365 wnaethau, 52 adegwadau, 7 adegwadau. Mae'r adegwadau metaws, mae'n adegwadau i gael i'r wyath sy'n gallu yn fwyfydio ti'n gallu cael llawer. Mae'r adegwadau, felly, wydd yna'u 9 adegwadau. O'r holl gyd, ac mae gennym ni'n 52 oes oes yn ymdweithio. Mae'n gweithio i'r holl gysylltu. Mae'r diwrnod yn Llywodraeth Ysgrifedd yn gweld yn ymddorol yn Gweithlu'r Llywodraeth Ysgrifedd yn gweithio'r yma, yr ysgrifedd o'r hefyd. Mae'n ddweud bod ni wedi gweithio'r holl gysylltu, yr hynny yma yn ysgrifedd yn gweithio'r Llywodraeth Ysgrifedd yn gweld yn gweithio'r holl gysylltu. mae'n ddweud eich cyflwynt yng Nghymru sy'n ddweud y dyfodaeth ymlaennau, a mae wedi'i ddweud y 500 dyfodaeth. Yn ydych chi'n ddweud ychydig yn gyfeilio a'i ddysgu'r teulu oedd yn yr un oedd. Yn ydych chi'n ddweud yma, mae yna y plan yma yma y prinsipol ar y hwn yn y stryd llaw. Mae'n ddweud ymlaennau o Oxford Arkylogi ar y stryd lluniedd ymoled yn 2007. First floor level, nol ranges between 3-4 floors depending on which part of the complex you're in because as the name suggests is built on a hill. It slopes away to the north and you have more levels on that side. Oxford Assessment by Julian Mumby and his team were really the first to try and un-pick some of the phasing at nol. being looking at a very complex set of structures and trying to understand which essentially which bits came first and second and so on. So you can see the broad phasing that was assigned here. The black is the earliest so this is possibly parts of the All other parts of the Pre-Boucher house followed by the blue which is the archbishops extensions, the green are subsequent archbishops up to Whereham in the 1530s. We have an orange phaseth there for the crown so Errhaul is still a lot of debate oedd oedd wedi bod Henroedd 8 yn ymwyf yn broddiadol yn eu ddod yn dweud yma. Ond cymdeithasol yn y 17 ysgrifenni ar gyfer y blwyddyn i'r ffordd mor hwnnw, yn lle o'r ffazor ffordd, iddyn nhw'n ddweud sut ydym yn gweithio. Felly byddwn i'n bwysig i'r ddweud cyfaint, mynd i'r ddweud yn ddweud, bo'r ddweud yn ddweud i'r ddweud, bo'n ddweud am gweithio'r ddweud, felly rydyn ni'n gobl yn gychwyn gaf o'r gweithio'r ddweud. I yw y tŷrfwyr ar y brydwyr sydd wedi fe ydych chi'n meddwl am fydd yn ymddangos. Yn 2011, mae'n parwysgrifes yming yng nghyd-rwyngfadol yng Nghaerlygu Dŵr Slygu. Fy laeth, mae'n fwyllhyng a haneswynt ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos, ac oeddydd yn oedda ni'n ff frustration ar y gyrdd, ond mae'n gyd-dynnal y Fy hoffwyr ac oedd yn gyrdd y hon 那. Fy hwnnw'n rhoi bod wnaeth ychydig i ddim yn y crossfwyr ymddangos. ac y ddwylo cymaint, y ystod yma yn ei wneud. Y dyfodol yn y ddwylo yn y ddysgu'r ysgol ymlaen. Felly, rwy'n ddweud yn ymlaen i chi'n gwybod ar hynny. 2013-14, mae'r ffaith o'r ffasgau yn y ddwylo yn y ddwylo'r hefyd. Felly, y gallwch yn ei wneud y clyweddau yn sicr. Ieithio ymddangos yma gydag yma, a'r ystod o'r pannu yng Nghymru i'r rwys yw'r cyflig a'r ystod o'r ymddangos. Rydyn ni'n meddwl yma'r ymddangos o'r projectol yn niol, ac yn ymddangos 5 ymddangos, ac yn ymddangos arall, yma yma yw'r projectol, yma'r 20 miliwn cyflig ymddangos, ymddangos yn yn ymddangos ymddangos, ac yn ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos. Ond yng Nghymru, yng Nghymru sydd wedi'u cyfarchedau a'r ffordd y bydd yw'r ymgyrch, ymgyrch yn fflux, mae'r ysgawdd yn ffocws i'r ymgyrch, ac mae'n credu unrhywm yn cwrwfyrdd yn bwrdd o'r ymgyrch yn ei ddweud o'r llwy ffrindiau a'r ysgawdd ymgyrchau sydd wedi bod yn gweithio i gyrch ar y project. Felly, mae arweinwch yma yma arÔf ymgyrch yn cyfarchedau. Nol yn ystod y 7 acers o rofnod. Rwy'n meddwl i'r cyfrifol ac yn meddwl i'r cyfrifol, ac yn meddwl i'r cyfrifol o'r 3-4 acers o rofnod. Yn ymgyrch, mae'n meddwl i'r cyfrifol. Mae'r ffordd 1, 1, o'r ffordd 1 o'r ffordd 1, 1, 3, 1, 4, ac ddim. Mae'n meddwl i'r cyfrifol o'r plan, rwy'n meddwl i'r cyfrifol o'r hynod, a fe oedd yn rhan o'i olwgrdd fel oedd, a'i meddwl i'r ymgyrch? Mae'n meddwl i'r cyfrifol o'r 2 o rhan o'r rhan o'r ffordd o'r plan. Daethu'n siwr hawdd o hynny'n meddwl i'r cyfrifol gyffin. Rwy'n meddwl i'r projecs mae'n ddod i'r gwell o'r cyfrifol o'r ffordd o'r bydden o'r ffordd o'r cyfrifol. Hysbeth o oedd y peth o ffordd o'r roig. Yn ymgyrch, i Bilonau Sinyddion a'r Gweithio Gweithraedd I. 17th-century gallery called the retainers gallery. These are the areas that came back to the National Trust as part of this project. This is a newly opened to the public space and one that we will be considering a little bit further in the future. I just draw your attention to this fireplace here. Also, this photo was taken quite early in the project but essentially this is how the spaces are presented to the public. There was a lot of thinking by the curators on the project about presentation through the project and we're going to be touching on that this evening as well. As well as all of the works that I've described to the showrooms and the new spaces, we also undertook a rearrangement of our visitor welcome, including the creation of Bookshop, the only bookshop for new books in the National Trust in the West Range, as I mentioned, a rearrangement and a refurbishment of the visitor centre. It wouldn't be the National Trust if we didn't also refurbish the cafe. New cafe and tea room facilities were extended facilities in the brew house yard, so that's on the northern side of the building complex. This is also on the northern side of the property and this is the medieval barn. This photo dates from 1887 and shows a very traumatic fire, as you can see, that removed the roof of the barn, the medieval roof of the barn and of the hayloft next door to it. When it was replaced in the Victorian period, it was replaced at a very shallow pitch with some crenellations around the top of it, which were essentially what made up. A big part of our project was to reinstate the medieval silhouette of the roof, so the gable has been re-extended and access created directly from this space into the hayloft next door, which is now an education centre. The medieval barn is now a custom-built conservation studio for specialist work. It's also a visited space, so you can go into this space, you can go up to the end and have a look at what the conservators are doing and chat to them about their work. It is very much part of the visitor engagement or visitor experience at the property, so a newly opened part. This is the roof of the outer wicket, and this is also, I think, one of my most exciting days at work. If you see this little dot at the bottom here, this is a truck. The truck was holding a cherry picker, and I was in the cherry picker looking down on the top of the roof. We were looking at this roof with a view to roof repairs at the turrets, and also because this space on the leaded area here is now also open to the public, so you can climb up to the top of the outer wicket and get the view across the property. Within the tower itself, again this is a photo from the beginning of the project, these were lived spaces, so we know Eddie Sackfield West lived there, so Vita's cousin who famously inherited because he was a boy, and also Mr Mason lived here, one of the estate agents for the Sackfield family, so this is what it looked like at the beginning, and we have some light touch presentation, essentially, to show this space as Eddie Sackfield West would have known it. We have his book collection, we know what kind of music he was listening to, and this is, again, a space that visitors can now access as part of their time at Null. The Great Hall as well is our only ground floor showroom, and this is, again, the area at the beginning of the project. Representation, again, in this space, accompanied by a lot of curatorial research by Emma Slocum, our curator, looking at that sort of thorny question within the National Trust of what do you take a space back to? What time are we looking to show? In this space, actually, the presentation is of the early 20th century now, so it shows the room as it would have been used at the turn of the century, the turn of the 20th century, by the family, so this has been accompanied by research into paint schemes, the picture hang, lighting, the sort of decorative elements of that space, and this is what visitors will now see when they come in to the Great Hall. One final example, this is the Spangled Bedroom, so this is one of our first floor showrooms, a very precious collection at Null, internationally significant collection of textiles, of furniture, of art, and all at the beginning of the project housed in very environmentally unsuitable conditions, very cold, very damp, and prone to big swings in temperature, so having a huge, all of that was having a huge impact on these fragile materials within the showrooms. So this is where the sort of Null inspired by Null project focus was looking at improving those environmental conditions, so looking at improving the structure of the spaces, so for example in this case there was a concern that the bed was actually holding the ceiling up, there was a slight, shall we say slight bow to it? It turned out it wasn't when the bed came down, but nonetheless the ceiling has been lifted and conserved so it is now stable. Looking at installing things like fire compartmentation, insulation, better lighting, environmental heating, all of those sort of services going into these spaces, so this is the before as I mentioned and this is now. So the biggest change as you can see in this room is the insulation of a glass screen, so we have a new glass screen in this space that wasn't there before and glass screens as well, improved glass screens in the king's room and in the Venetian bedroom, and also just bringing that light level back to a much more evocative way of viewing the room, all of the collection has been conserved and the picture hang has been reconsidered in this space as well as the arrangement of the furniture. So this is all, what we're looking at here is all of the end product and the beautiful bits and what we're going to look at is the untidy section that goes along with getting to this point. So as I mentioned, we have a huge collection. In order for the spaces to be conserved, that collection had to be decanted, so the house and collections team at Null, led by Helen Forbert, house and collections manager, we're responsible for decanting the collections and either removing them off-site or storing them on-site during the project. Our contractors on this project actually went into administration not just once but twice, leading to some delays in our programme, so we had to construct a temporary store in the Great Hall during 2016 because we couldn't store our collections in the studio store, which wasn't yet ready. So it again became part of the visitor experience during 2016. You could get a close-up look at some of the items from various showrooms. This is the ballroom and is a view showing the space with the collection decanted, with the exception of this very large marble table which was too heavy to move and had to be boxed in during the project. So you just start to get a sense of those 17th century spaces. We have the extraordinary plasterwork ceiling, the panelling on the walls, the inserted 17th century fireplace, all freely available to see without all of that pesky furniture in the way. This is the ballroom during the project. Now in this space we removed most of the panelling from the walls. So as with every archaeological project our impact to the building was mitigated. From an archaeological perspective it obviously would have been brilliant to have been able to take up every single floorboard and take off every bit of panelling and really have a complete view of what was going on underneath. Of course we could not do that so we mitigated our impact by only removing panelling where it needed to be removed and the same for the floorboards. So in some spaces it was just a couple of floorboards up, just a little bit of panelling off. However it was almost all the panelling that came off the walls. Quite a complicated process because as you can see the decorative elements come off first and then the remainder is in very large sheets which is actually overlapped by the floor which is later. So they all had to be lifted up and then dropped down in a slightly hot stopping exercise. Here we see an example of a more extensive floorboard removal. This is at the northern end of the Leicester gallery where again we had all the floorboards up in that space. So we have some areas where the entirety of the structure beneath the later additions was exposed and somewhere we only had a keyhole into the past. Now in order to be able to undertake a project of this scope we're obviously working with a huge team just from the archaeological side of the project we are working with specialist conservators. This is Jan Kutajar from University College London. Graffiti specialists, this is Matthew Champion. Dendro chronologists, here we have Ian Tyres. Geometricians, this is Mark Birch from Moeller and Buildings Archaeologists again from Moeller and this is James Wright in the bottom here. Alongside this there are also academic research projects running at null during this period of time so teams from Southampton University and Northwestern University led by Professor Matthew Johnson who looked at null as part of a wider project on high status sites in the southeast and also landscape survey undertaken by Alistair Oswald here from the University of York. The key members of our team were the contractors on site this is Dan, our site and the informant, Dan Morrison and the null archaeology volunteer team Mrs Graham. Now there are a couple of the archaeology volunteer team in the room I'm not going to embarrass them by making them stand up but should you have any questions I would quiz them. They are expert finds retrieval specialists under the floorboards behind the paneling and a lot of sieving as you can see so we did a lot of sieving of dust which came in very handy when we later did some evaluation test bits in the car park during 2019 and we also sieved the deposits from the car park looking for evidence of prehistoric archaeology more on that later. So the volunteers were trained as part of the Heritage Lottery funded project there's a week long training course that ran every year for five years and all together 80 people completed that course around I think a third of those are still active members of the archaeology team at the end of the project a number of people have obviously moved away or got jobs and all of those sorts of things and they are a key part of the interpretation of archaeology at the property today. So a few of the results now for such a huge project we had very little excavation work part of it really revolving around services so the installation of a lift pit in the barn to access the conservation studio this is part of the work from the barn area so this is, well I'm in a medieval drain to take this photo what I realised subsequently getting out of this medieval drain is that it is still in use so be careful when you decide to investigate these things is my tip for the top so a lot of our infrastructure at Null is based in the medieval and post medieval period and is still live test pits out at the front of the building for British telecom cables we found some evidence for 17th century activity probably around the time of the Civil War so this is a stamped pipe dating to the 1640s and also a musket ball found by Mola during their excavations at the front but really again very much any key holes into the below ground archaeology we have been working a lot with the donor family so we've been receiving donations from them of artifacts they found in their garden while they've been digging over time so this was found by Bridgett, Satfield West and as you can see Turks head clay pipes in 19th century and our excavations in the car park revealed quite a lot of evidence unsurprisingly perhaps for eating and drinking in the park over hundreds of years but it certainly seems that it was popular in the 20th century if you had a picnic at Null to just dig into the very very sandy soil that we have there and leave your beer bottles or your mineral water bottles or whatever you had been imbibing on said day we as I mentioned earlier we've also been looking a little bit at the prehistory of the park we've been driven by Alistair Oswald's survey work so there's a huge story still to learn about Null before Null and the prehistoric landscape given that we have a thousand-acre deer park and we can trace the medieval and post medieval history to a certain extent what we're interested in finding out more about in the future is that prehistoric land view so Alistair has identified evidence for field systems a possible barrow which has not been previously identified as far as we know that is at Echo Mount and this is a collection of artefacts again from the early 20th century in the Seven Lakes Museum so someone has clearly had a look before but I've yet to find any antiquarian records of excavation sometimes you do find the unexpected as well these are modern they're on the surface so at first we thought they might be Roman but they are most definitely not they are 21st century artefacts and it just gives us an insight into how people may be using the park in our modern society we shall move on so as I mentioned the research projects, the academic projects have really demonstrated the huge value in that elements of landscape survey and looking beyond the building setting mill within its context and here we're looking at Alistair's plan of the private garden and the identification he's undertaken there looking at earlier features such as quarry pits and terracing and evidence for earlier garden divisions so he should be publishing that I believe this year in Arculergia Cantiana and obviously when it's very dry we had some patch marks as well which was very exciting so you can see we've got very clear circular patch marks they are here just there so they could be those which are from an early 18th century view of Null by Kip and Niff or they could be these shown on Victorian photographs in the same place so this was really a way of just saying there's a lot to learn about the landscape in which Null sits and we've really only, if you'll excuse the pun, scratched the surface so we have been talking so far about the west front with the outer wicket just here the car park which is just here the brew house courtyard to the north of the property and the barn to the north and now we're going to move to the interior and look at some of the spaces on the eastern and southern ranges of the building so the first thing that we commissioned as part of the project was a full survey of the showrooms and the new spaces which was undertaken by a museum of London archaeology and here's Catherine Drew, a senior geometrician at the front establishing the control network in front of the outer wicket this is Mola's survey data overlaying on the wider ground plan in grey there so obviously the coloured areas are the areas that have been surveyed and where the colours are brightest we have the most data so in the central part of the property here we have data that is from ground floor all the way to the roof level but really the majority of the survey is only at first floor level our showrooms if you like are the ham in the sandwich of the donor family's lease so the publicly open spaces are boxed on both sides in many places by the private apartments so a huge area of Null was examined as part of the inspired by Null project but it really is percentage wise probably only about 30% of the entire complex so we are working with data that is very much partial we've got 3D sort of jigsaws without quite a few of the pieces missing so as a result from Mola's survey we have accurate floor plans of each space showing fireplaces, windows, the direction of the floorboards openings into the space we have elevation drawings of each room so showing the panelling and the windows and immediately you can start to see what may have originally presented as quite a uniform scheme of panelling is in fact anything but and we've had lots of replacement and change over time and access has been cut through where they weren't before and these drawings are actually extremely useful for the engineers, the architects and also the curators on the project so they were used to do things like redesigning the picture hang so this is one of Emma's pictures so the exterior works I mentioned right at the beginning this is the catchley named phase 1.1 so we are looking at the northeastern corner of the complex and we are looking across a tangled roofscape of a whole series of different roofs everything dating from the late medieval period all the way through to the 20th century so over 20 phases of construction recorded across those two ranges, the eastern and southern range and parts of the northern range as well so we have evidence for carpenter's marks for recycling of timbers for some frankly surprising building techniques to the point where we have a number of different things that we found at Null which are just normal for Null but not necessarily found anywhere else we have evidence that was seen for the first time from the outside if that makes sense so this is the gable end of part of the late medieval building which is behind Borshe's chapel so this is one of our earliest surviving fragments of Null right up to roof level a favourite roof if I'm allowed to have such a thing is the roof of the old kitchen where we have exposed here the decorative wind braces and you can see we have a later ceiling inserted here below now the suggestion from Museum of London Archaeology the interpretation which we agree with is that you would have been able to see these in the original iteration of that roof so it would have looked something like this so it has led to some discussion around whether what we are looking at here in the old kitchen is actually the original great hall of the property and the alignment has been shifted round to where the great hall is now unfortunately we are only able to record the roof as part of our project we weren't able to record the masonry below it so there is still a research project in the future there to look at the development of that space which would be absolutely fascinating we are looking back here to what we now call the pigeon lofts which are an area that was constructed at the same time as this roof but actually cuts off a fireplace below so we can tell that we've got multiple phases going on in this space that still require some untangling Fines this is from the old kitchen roof and as you can see is the unauthorised biography completely uncensored of Marilyn Monroe so the artifacts that we found during this project were a really fascinating snapshot of the kinds of things that people leave in roof spaces one of the first finds actually one of the activities we have the most evidence for in the roof spaces is smoking everything from World War I period cigarette papers these I recognise myself, I didn't leave them there I'll just add, these are 1980s, 90s risler papers wood binds at the top dated 1961 a matchbox which again has two peoples names Burton and Mr Groves and a date on the side of 1949 and the bunny ashtray here repurposed feeding bowl maybe as you can see from the top two examples occasionally these are little time capsules they have been left for someone to find so this is yet another example from the West Range roof packet of gold flake and inside it says W Eastwood plumber from Bessels Green which is in Riverhead he was at Christmas in 1931 and he was with Tom White mate to the above he was only allowed to write on the side of the packet so I mentioned earlier we were looking at render repairs as well on the eastern face and you could see some quite serious structural issues presented once the Victorian render had been removed and also evidence for earlier attempts to repair what was clearly long standing problems in some spaces the stripping of the render gave us the opportunity to record the timber superstructure beneath so this is Mola's excellent field record on top of a photograph by Downland survey off the ground floor which again fell beyond the scope of our project immediately you can see that what initially presents itself is a very uniform sort of regulated façade is the result of hundreds of years of development of that façade one of those periods of development was represented here and this is a discovery that we made during the project previously unaware that we had the remnants of the early 16th century fenestration scheme still surviving in the form of this botel moulding which is also structural so it is a decorative element of the window it also forms part of the upstanding superstructure and you can see David Soracur's reconstruction drawing here so that allows us to David to reconstruct the façade of Noel in the early 16th century so around the period of Archbishop Werham there seems to have been a substantial amount of work undertaken in this area of the property by those later archbishops so here we are back in the retainers gallery and this is a picture by Joseph Nash from 1840 so he made it in 1840 but he populated it as he thought it would have been used in the early 17th century some of the details he has added are tapestries on the walls and obviously the people others though he was drawing what he saw so remember when I said remember that fireplace that's the fireplace that was originally there in this space so certainly what we found during this project was that things move around a lot at Noel and that includes the fireplaces so if the family liked a particular fireplace they would just move it to a room that they were using this in the Venetian dressing room is another example of a fireplace and it's surround that presented us with something of a surprise it was blocked up and when we took the blocking away not just one but two fireplaces were missing and it also turned out that the entire over mantle is a confection so it is not the original in situ over mantle it has been made from lots of other bits so as Helen puts it it is the Frankenstein of fireplaces we still don't know where all these different elements actually come from and some appear to have come from an external context they're quite weathered like this central figure here who we think might be a Saint Christopher so again our archaeology volunteer team are keen to research more about this oh I should just add that is now what you see as well in terms of the presentation when you go to Nol you will see exactly that without the dust but the presentation in the Venetian dressing room is designed to show those layers of archaeology and building history so it is one space where you can see the earlier parts of the building so stripping back the building we start to see evidence for earlier paint schemes so this is the second painter's fair lobby 18th century scheme now hidden under the panelling sometimes there was the opportunity to really reconstruct something that essentially is a very large archaeological find here so all of these pieces were found in the South Barracks in one of the Attics and Jan reconstructed them upon his realisation that what he was looking at was a 17th century cusm cast so this has now been fully reconstructed by Jan working with David Noon one of our specialist carpenters and is back on display in the spangled bedroom where it originally was so moving round the building we are in the south range here and we are just going to have a quick look at the cartoon gallery wall so the removal of the cartoons and of part of the velvet kafoi covering upon which they hang revealed the 17th century picture frames beneath some amazing detective work by Jerry Alibone our conservator from the studio at Noel and Catherine Daunt from the National Portrait Gallery has demonstrated that the ribbon portraits which now hang in the brown gallery originally hung here in the cartoon gallery and in their analysis of the nail holes on the back of the panels has enabled the scheme to be able to know which portraits hung in which aperture all of this is now of course covered up again because the cartoons have gone back on the wall even more interesting than 17th century picture frames behind that wall is the remains of the medieval palace so you can see here in blue and we have this medieval door which is this here so this is part of probably Archbishop Borshe's palace so in the 17th century Thomas Satfield appears to have knocked through and narrowed so he made the gallery thinner but he also opened it out so we have evidence for room divisions which no longer exist hidden behind the picture frame wall with the cartoons also lots of evidence for ritual protection marks which I'm going to have to talk a lot faster if we're going to get to brown gallery here it is in SNH corks image of the 1930s with those ribbon portraits on the wall and here it is during the project so yet another space where we were able to remove all the paneling and have a look at the fabric beneath just peeking out here this is Robin Mills who is our building surveyor currently undertaking the QQ at Noel so a few features here we're looking here into this is the China closet and behind this section of the panelling was a rather surprising area of brick walling which appears to have been built up against the panelling with the panelling in situ certainly never meant to have been seen we think this might be for a blocked staircase that would have originally gone to the ground floor we have no articulation between first and ground floor on this eastern range other than the cook's tower which is a 17th or 18th century addition so there's, as I said, still a lot of questions to be asked about how people are moving between floors in the medieval period evidence for quite a severe fire you can see the child timbers here the easternmost end of the brown gallery next to Lady Betty's bedroom obviously not severe enough though that they didn't think they could retain it so they've just carried on adding other bits of structural timber to it and it's still there evidence for medieval doors it's mostly now blocked and no longer in use so giving us those indications of how people were moving through the spaces in the 16th century one suggestion is that we have this sort of more highly moulded arched doorways representing the principal entrances or the high status entrances into these spaces with the square headed doorways perhaps representing the service entrances into these different spaces this again is in Lady Betty's bedroom and this is Mola's drawing of that so Lady Betty's bedroom has this small medieval door at the rear has another door punched through here has another door just there and then it has two other doors on the eastern side so it actually has five accesses into a very small space that have been in use at various different periods of time Dendrochronology we had mixed results so sometimes very good dating results sometimes not for the Brown Gallery we have three dates again from that eastern end which help us to confirm that these are alterations in the archipiscopal period and moving round to the ballroom again we have more evidence here for alterations in the 17th century so this is the door into the second hand of stair lobby and when we took the paneling off we thought we'd find a medieval door underneath there isn't one and actually what it appears has happened is in the 17th century they've just punched through the wall so what that suggests is that in the medieval period there was no direct connection at the vertical level between this space which was the solar and the south range running along here which was something of a surprise and also a structural challenge because this had three limtools within it which were all rotten so that had to be repaired on the other side of the room we have medieval windows so these are again probably part of archbishop Borsche's design of this space three very large windows along that facade looking into the pheasant court so what is now quite a dark space in the medieval period would have actually been very bright and light the Leicester Gallery which we mentioned already now beneath the Leicester Gallery we have a strange mezzanine area which is called Fred West Flat not that Fred West but this is part of the construction within Fred's Flat and is below the Leicester Gallery floor so it seems to have been a series of ribbed timbers that were in place in order to support this corner of the building what we're looking at here is the corner of the pre-Borsche building so it's encased within later masonry below this floor here in the Leicester Gallery so again we had early 16th century dates returned from the Leicester Gallery and as I said earlier all of the floorboards came up in there so you can see this earlier pre-Borsche tower under the floor there and the red is the outlines of Fred's Flat so you can see how it fits in wrapping around this earlier masonry very confusing part of the building at first floor level we also have evidence for lots of room divisions which no longer exist and looking out across the whole of the first floor this is Mola's interpretation of where they have evidence for potential medieval room divisions so I should stress that this is there is a huge amount more work to be done understanding all of this data that has been gathered over eight years from the King's Tower we have again evidence of 17th century alteration of a medieval space including the insertion of a very large and high status fireplace we also have I'm going to assume that everyone's heard of ritual protection marks marks applied to a building designed to ward off evil we have a whole series of them in this upper King's room they are running in sequence across the beam in front of the fireplace so designed to protect the occupant of the space from anything nasty coming down the chimney to try and get them these we can date exactly to the period immediately following the gunpowder plot so they seem to have been a response to we suggest the events of that time so as I mentioned earlier graffiti was a major part of our research and chime very nicely in many cases with the evidence we have from the artifacts of what people are doing especially in these upper level spaces this is actually in the upper King's room we have graffiti on the glass so we have some 18th century graffiti here this is Samuel Ball a plumber or a lead worker George the housemaid underneath him and John Fowler or Foster these are in the second painter's stare lobby on the window glass it's scratched all over on the masonry remains this is in one of the staff apartments clearly a popular spot to revisit and leave your mark over probably several decades of the 19th century 18th and 19th centuries we have evidence about the social history at Null so this one says temporary gas pipe for Great Hall Hunt Ball January 6th 1895 so telling us about an event which we might otherwise not have known about and this is in the retainers gallery these attic level spaces which were unused for essentially hundreds of years are covered in late Victorian graffiti from the people who visited these spaces working there we have some limited evidence for medieval masonry's marks we do have some pre-reformation medieval text so I've just brought this one out a little bit for you so this is on the door from the Reynolds room from the second painter's stare lobby and it says THOM Thomas B, contractions C, H, R, E so our best reading of that is Thomas Boucher so I leave it to your discretion as to whether you want to believe like I do that the Archbishop of Canterbury was scratching his name on the walls of his own palace because why not, it was his there is evidence for medieval wall painting as well at Null this is in the north wing cellars this is part of the private apartments and as I mentioned earlier there is also evidence for medieval ritual protection in the form of these burn marks so the idea behind these or one of the ideas is that you are inoculating your building you are burning a little bit of it so the rest of it doesn't burn down and we have a huge number of these on that cartoon gallery of medieval wall that I mentioned earlier running all the way across that elevation they are not left behind from candles left unattended because there are no fixings for candles that are deliberately created so as mentioned earlier with a huge amount of data this is just a selection of some of the reports we tried to bring this together in a publication last year and here is the shameless plug we wrote a book, it's called Null Revealed we have some here tonight if you would like to buy some they are only £2 and they're all proceeds go back to the property so just to finish off I wanted to look at the work of the volunteers and particularly at some of the artefacts that we discovered looking below the floorboards so here are just a few of the team working in the south barracks and this is our archaeology store so this is where we are processing and cataloging all of the finds that came from the house and these are all of the finds that came from the house so we do have thousands of artefacts this is also open to the public so this is part of the visitor route on the guided tours where visitors can come in and chat with the team about what they're working on and the different kinds of aspects of the project this is a typical below the floors deposit where it hadn't been previously disturbed so we were not the first people by any means to look under the floorboards at Null there have been generations of estate workers who have been repairing and maintaining this fabric over time but where they hadn't been and this is in the pigeon lofts you have lots and lots of dust and debris we have part of a shoe we have a little medicine bottle there probably 18th century maybe 19th so that's a snapshot of the sorts of things we were looking through this is our earliest dateable artefact this is a late medieval early post medieval so it's 1580s to 1630s Nuremberg jeton from Hans Krauwin called the second it is really interesting that we don't as far as I'm aware we have gone through all of the archive now we don't appear to have any medieval artefacts so the 17th century reconstruction within this building redevelopment in this building was very thorough in terms of removing those medieval floor levels and medieval ceiling levels as far as I'm aware it's our earliest dateable artefact and it's found by Adam one of our building contractors some lovely snapshots into life at Null this is from the East Attics which were used as servants quarters we've got hairpins and buttons and beads and coins a cold cream pot lid here not just any cold cream it's superior cold cream this is Null after all more evidence for smoking so yet another deliberately left artefact this was placed under a small set of stairs again in the East Attics so 18th century clay pipe hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of spangles found unsurprisingly in the spangled bedroom under the floor they had fallen off the bed hangings so we picked them all up and they were reattached to the bed hangings as part of the project so that was a very satisfying result 17th century letter found under the floorboards this is from Copt Hall in 1633 and is a letter from one steward to another essentially like a amazon wish list please will you send the following items to me, a new frying pan my lady Cranfield's lights for her chamber some green fish some new fire shovels and so on wonderful little artefact it is artfully placed but that is the condition in which it was found so we could read it on the day we found it which was hugely exciting and the final artefact that I'm going to talk about is this one in April 2017 so Will and Jake from the contracted team this is Jim who also found the letter so he found so many artefacts he's now called Jim Deanna Jones this is Brenda, this is Deb he's here and Sue now Brenda spotted this can you all see what Brenda spotted this just here in a very deep void in the East for Athletes we couldn't get in it so we had to go out so we lifted this with Hoover and it turned out to be this which is amazing because you can see it's got something inside it so it's a message in a bottle and on the back of the message you could read it through the bottle it said take this out and see inside and we needed no further invitation so we probably did and it says this bottle was dropped here AD 1906 by SG Doggitt when these radiators were put in also the hot water service so this is a a knoll headed paper in an old Perrier bottle would have been new obviously in 1906 so we were able to find out quite a lot about Cyndogitt because he's one of our most prolific graffitiers so here just below actually where the bottle was found SG Doggitt started work at knoll July 1898 retiring September 16th 1960 so he worked at knoll for 62 years and he revisited this spot and a number of others time and time again and left his mark every time he did it and people obviously knew he was doing it because clearly he did not add that at the bottom there so it was obviously accepted and acceptable to add your name to the wall at knoll and it's wonderful to be able to build up a picture of an individual in this way we have a fantastic volunteer led oral history project at knoll it's called knoll stories you can look it up online and through the oral history project we were able to get in touch with SG Doggitt's family because they are still local to knoll so they were able to come in and see their great grand dad's message in a bottle and they donated his toolbox to us through our collection we also because it is the age of the internet we tweeted Perrier and said hey look what we found and they sent us some Perrier goodies and a message in a bottle which was rather sweet now that message in a bottle we put into our own time capsule of the project and here's Dan Morrison again hiding the time capsule away we're not telling anyone exactly where we put it so we filled that with memories of the National Trust at knoll and all of the team who were working on this huge project and hid it away hopefully for someone to find in a hundred years so I hope you've enjoyed this glimpse into knoll this evening and thank you very much for having me here