Graphic Words was commissioned to produce three interpretation panels 
for the Caerhays Estate, near Goran in Cornwall.
Working with project partners English Nature, pdp Green consulting engineers and Cornwall Council’s Archaeological Unit, the estate had undertaken the consolidation of three historic structures: the ornamental “Battery Walk Arch”, a kennel block, and the extensive kitchen garden wall.
Graphic Words designed and compiled the panels, working from materials supplied, supplemented by further research.
The A0-size Battery Walk Arch board was fabricated as an “nViro” panel and installed, mounted in a painted metal lectern frame, in the Estate’s beachside car park. The panel is located to provided a view towards its subject, an ornamental arch which carried a “picturesque” walkway across the line of the former road. To set the arch within its period landscape context, the panel is dominated by an 1840 engraving of the view in front of the panel.
The Arch was designed to provide a viewpoint for the castle owners and their guests. To help visitors place the structure within its historical context, we overlaid figures from period fashion plates on a modern photograph of the consolidated arch platform, giving an impression of how it may have appeared in the 1820s.
Further inland on the estate, consolidation work was also undertaken on the hunting hounds’ kennel block, built from the 1860s onwards, and the wall surrounding the extensive kitchen gardens, dating from the 1840s. Both structures are important in preserving echoes of country house life in Cornwall in the 19th century – the kennels being one of very few such complexes which survive in Cornwall.
(Above) The north-eastern wall of the kitchen garden and the kennels complex
Graphic Words designed and compiled two A1 interpretation panels for these consolidated structures, which were wall-mounted at each location.
