Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal estate near Ripon will be welcoming students from the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment on Sunday 7 March.

Joining the students from the UK Foundation will be eighteen Building Craft Apprentices from the areas devastated by hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. The apprentices will be learning about the variety of traditional heritage craft work in use today, and discovering new skills to take home to help rebuild their disaster-struck city.

The students will join Henry Rumbold, MBE, for a talk and tour of the National Trust estate. Henry was awarded the MBE for services to stonemasonry and is on the executive committee for the National Heritage Training Group. The visit to Fountains Abbey provides a rare opportunity for the students to discover some of the traditional building craft skills in practice on a World Heritage Site which contains a 12th century abbey and corn mill, and 18th century lodges and follies.     

The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment is an educational charity which exists to improve the quality of people’s lives by teaching and practicing timeless and ecological ways of planning, designing and building.     

The Foundation aims to help address the growing shortage of skilled craftspeople in the UK and has been working in partnership with the National Trust at Fountains Abbey for three years.

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PRESS CONTACT
Alexa Morton, Visitor Experience and Marketing Manager. Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal, Estate Office, Ripon, North Yorkshire, HG4 3DY.  Tel 01765 643199 Fax 01765 601002