Conservation Works at Roof Constructions and Roofs of a Historic Ensemble – Lohra Castle

The project aims to combine practical interventions to reconstruct and maintain the historic gardens and parks with heritage education and the promotion of the idea of volunteering for heritage.
The practical works of the project will take place at the so called "kitchen garden", situated at the southern edge of Belvedere Palace Park. The kitchen garden had been arranged in the 19th century as a combined fruit, vegetable and flower garden. Time has had its hand on this garden, and some of its elements have been lost to nature’s way. Nonetheless, the traces of the original designs remain. As in the previous years, the project will combine two tasks – the conservation of the dry-stone walls surrounding the garden and the reconstruction of its former path system.
The dry-stone walls as the formative element of the kitchen garden are ruinous and need to be protected against progressive decay. During the previous years the structure has being successively repaired. Within the framework of the 2018 project the first steps have been undertaken, which were advanced in 2019 and 2020; finally, in 2021 the works on one of the main walls was completed. The project in 2022 and the works of 2023 will now continue at one of the lateral dry stone walls that contain the hill beside the pathway leading to the kitchen garden. Plants that damage the walls will be carefully taken away, the instable parts of the walls stone by stone deconstructed and later replaced. Since the dry-stone walls are an important habitat for wild bees and other rare insects the interventions need to be carried out extremely carefully. The works will be guided by a stone mason specialised on dry stone walls and traditional masonry techniques, who will provide additional theoretical knowledge in this field.
Another part of the group will continue to reconstruct a stone stairway connecting the kitchen garden with the other parts of Belvedere Park as well as to uncover and reconstruct the pathway which had been leading to the central area of the kitchen garden, where a small fountain used to be located according to historical records. Eventually, the pathway will be uncovered all the way until the dry-stone wall and be restored to complete the narrative of this area of the site.
The educational part of the project will inform the participants about the background of the project, while providing knowledge about historical gardens and parks, traditional gardening and other related topics. One of the thematic topics to be discussed are resilience strategies against climate change being implemented on historical gardens in Germany
When dealing with roof structures and roofings the priority is how best to protect the original substance against climatic influences and to avoid damages. The exteriors of a historical structure sustain the battering of the weather with frontal bouts of wind, rain and snow. In the case of Lohra Castle, the structures are more directly hit due to its elevated location above a hill, a situation which has increased during the last years due to the influence of climate change. Its geographical situation places Lohra Castle in the line of stronger storms which have been rampaging over Germany in the recent years dropping copious amounts of water and blowing powerful gusts of wind. Understandably, even the robust structures of these medieval edifices were not built to withstand such an aggressive onslaught by nature. Facing this increasingly unstable climate hazards posed to the historical structures, solutions are being thought to adapt conservation strategies into disaster risk planning. Preserving historic legacy for future generations is an important way to consolidate heritage conservation resilience. Lohra Castle includes architectural relics from the Middle Ages onwards; between the 11th and the 20th every century had left its traces which are still standing tall overlooking the Thuringian landscape. However, some of the structures need conservation interventions. The project in 2023 will be a continuation of the work started in the years 2020 and 2021, and it will concentrate on the roof constructions and roofings of the19th century barn house. The barn house was used to house sheep, as part of the transformations that the site underwent during the time of Prussian occupation of the castle, when Lohra became an important regional agricultural centre. Today the building is used mostly for storage, but the castle administration envisions a future expansion of the social spaces where volunteers and visitors can gather, therefore it is expected to become in the future a new gathering hall for events.The participants will be involved in tasks to help safeguarding these historical structures by replacing damaged elements on the wooden roof structures and the roofings. The project will be led by a master of carpentry who has additional education as “Restorer in Handicraft”. Guided tours and visits to other sites containing wooden structure ensembles of interest will be part of the educational programme that will allow the participants to have a broad overview of traditional construction techniques as found in central Germany.