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Photographs from the project
Princess Royal visit to Flounders Folly
Flounders Folly Restoration Project - what we achieved
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Flounders Folly Restoration Project - what we achieved
Location: Shropshire
What was achieved by the successfully completed Flounders Folly Restoration project, and the lasting effects it has had in the community.
This project complemented the physical restoration of an important local landmark by involving local people in raising awareness of its history, investigating and improving the natural heritage of the site, and celebrating its significance in the community.
Volunteers of all ages helped in various ways. Some worked with experts to clear the area and plant new hedges, and continued the ongoing tasks of landscape maintenance and litter picking. Others produced a booklet outlining the history of Benjamin Flounders and his folly, and created and continued to maintain a website (http://www.floundersfolly.org.uk). Members of the voluntary team passed on their knowledge and enthusiasm on regular weekend open days, and made special arrangements to open the folly at other times for visitors such as midweek rambling groups.
Hundreds of people attended meetings, lectures, picnics, and workshop days focusing on different aspects of nature conservation. Physical access to the monument is unavoidably restricted - it is not on a main road, and at least 20 minutes’ walk up a steep hill even before visitors climb the 78 steps to the top of the tower. A local farmer used his tractor to bring a group of elderly people up to visit the folly, sitting on hay bales on the back of the trailer.
The project published information about the site on several interpretation boards. One board was displayed in the Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre in the nearest town, Craven Arms, and another near to the place where visitors park their cars, illustrating the wildlife and the way up through the woods. Two identical boards were fixed on the kissing gates bordering the plot of land.
An artist was specially commissioned to produce weatherproof versions of watercolour paintings which were fixed to the walls on the four corners of the Folly, depicting and identifying the landscape features that could been seen from each vantage point.
The Flounders Folly Trust looked forward to completing the education pack of worksheets and activities designed to encourage children to write, draw and paint about the history, geology and natural heritage of the Folly so that they would value and want to care for it in the future.
They also planned to keep their website up to date with information about forthcoming events as well as the history and background, and eventually to add transcripts of recordings of local memories of the Folly, depositing the original recordings in an archive in the Local Studies library.
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