Overview
A quiet symbol of faith and resilience.
For sixty years the chapel stood roofless, its walls open to wind and ivy. Pigeons nested where the choir once sang, and the 1748 bell — cracked in a long-ago storm — lay silent in the grass. When our survey team first stepped inside in 2019, light fell through the empty tower exactly where the altar had been.
Three seasons of work followed: masons repointed every course of stone, conservators lifted centuries of soot from the wall paintings, and bell founders cast the crack out of the old bronze so it could ring again. Today the chapel welcomes visitors as a place of reflection, history, and renewed spirit.
i.
The challenge
Open to the sky for decades, the chapel had lost its roof, its plaster, and most of its written records. Fragments of 15th-century wall painting survived only as ghosts under lime wash, and the tower leaned eleven centimetres out of true.
ii.
Our approach
We stabilised first and restored second: a hidden steel frame straightened the tower, lime mortars matched the original mix, and every surviving paint fragment was photographed, mapped, and conserved in place before a single new brushstroke.
The council’s craftspeople treated our 200-year-old chapel like their own family history. Every stone was documented, every fresco saved.
— Eleanor Whitfield , Parish Warden, Marlow Abbey