Conserving ruined masonry: managing water regimes to enhance resilience in the face of changing environmental conditions

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English Heritage and other national and international organisations look after a huge number of vulnerable ruins which have often been subjected to complex management and conservation interventions in the past. Ruins include important archaeological sites and historic buildings constructed of masonry which will be the focus of this project. Water is the major agent of deterioration of these ruins, and effective management of water flowing over and within them is vital for their conservation. The project aims to provide a full and balanced evaluation of different strategies to conserve and protect masonry ruins through managing water movements into and out of the structures in order to provide better understanding and guidance. By combining field and laboratory methods with numerical modelling and monitoring, this project will enable the development of a new, highly applicable toolkit, tailored to assessing the vulnerability of ruined masonry. This approach will provide English Heritage and other organisations with a useful decision making tool for evaluating conservation options in the face of future climatic change. This will ensure that ruins can be more cost-effectively conserved and are more resilient to changing environmental conditions. The project has three objectives which will be addressed by different elements of the research. Objective one is to review what conservation strategies are currently or potentially available for managing moisture movement in ruined masonry. This will be addressed by collection information from existing published and unpublished documents, site visits and interviews with conservation professionals. The second objective is to collect robust data on the most promising conservation strategies identified in objective one, with a likely focus on 'hard' techniques such as hard capping and pointing. This will be addressed by developing and deploying innovative field monitoring and data collection methods to show how the conservation strategies influence water flow over and within ruins. The focus of data collection will be four bespoke test walls at the University of Oxford's Wytham Woods field site, built in collaboration with Historic England during a previous joint project. The third objective is to explore innovative numerical modelling methods to test the influence of changing environmental conditions on the performance of hard capping vs other conservation strategies. This will be addressed through using the findings from the first two parts of the project to inform numerical modelling. The modelling will allow a much wider range of climatic conditions to be simulated than can be gained from field monitoring alone, testing different conservation strategies under likely future climatic scenarios. The project will provide scientific and site-based evidence to help the sector conserve this important element of the built heritage. Research questions include:1. What are the potential conservation interventions for managing moisture ingress and egress in ruined masonry, and what are their strengths and weaknesses? 2. How do conservation interventions for ruined masonry of various types (especially 'hard' interventions like hard capping and pointing) influence water flow regimes (particularly ingress and egress of water)? 3. How can conservation interventions be optimised to ensure the best results under predicted future environmental conditions over the coming 50-100 years?This project will be undertaken in collaboration with both English Heritage and Historic England.This project falls within the AHRC Priority Research Area 4. The proposal addresses two key themes of the AHRC remit, i.e. heritage management (a level two theme within the level one theme of cultural and museum studies) and archaeology (a level one theme).