Your Visit at Work

Protecting the historic house
Russborough House is a large and complex historic structure that requires continuous maintenance alongside periodic major conservation projects. Visitor income plays a crucial role in addressing immediate risks while enabling long-term preservation.

Responding to climate pressures
Increased rainfall, wind, and storm events have led to a growing need for roof inspections, repairs, and preventative maintenance. Visitor income supports urgent post-storm works and planned interventions designed to reduce water ingress and long-term damage to the building fabric.

Windows and external fabric
Russborough has more than 200 historic windows, all of which require cyclical maintenance. Each year, visitor income supports the repair and repainting of approximately 40–50 windows. In the past year, this programme has also included targeted draught-proofing of windows in the main house, improving environmental stability for the collections while reducing energy consumption.

Heating and environmental control
The house operates a conservation heating system that runs continuously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This system is essential to preserving both the historic fabric of the building and the collections within.
Visitor income contributes to the annual maintenance and repair of this system, including boilers, pumps, the building management system, and environmental monitoring equipment such as data loggers. Each year, components require servicing, repair, or replacement, representing a substantial and ongoing investment.

East Colonnade
In the past year, visitor support enabled the completion of conservation works to the East Colonnade, addressing extensive internal structural damage that posed a risk to both the building and visitors. This complex project required specialist investigation, structural repair, and skilled stonemasonry, and the works are now complete.

Architectural urns and reinstatement
Ongoing work to conserve and reinstate architectural urns forms part of a wider programme to repair and enhance the external fabric of the house. While conservation works to the urns are supported through external grants, including funding from the Apollo Foundation and the Historic Structures Fund, visitor income is vital in enabling these projects to proceed.

Visitor support allows Russborough to commission the specialist architectural, conservation, and engineering assessments required to develop grant applications and compliant conservation proposals. As a Grade I listed building, works often require statutory approvals, including planning permission and specialist reports. Visitor income underwrites this essential preparatory work, without which grant-funded conservation projects could not progress.

Collections and Learning in Practice
Visitor income plays a vital role in the care, understanding, and sharing of Russborough’s collections. It supports preventative conservation, specialist cleaning, condition monitoring, and environmental management, helping to protect paintings, furniture, sculpture, and decorative arts for the long term. Stable temperature and humidity levels are carefully monitored and analysed daily to ensure the house provides the right conditions for these works to remain on display.

Visitor support also underpins education and access initiatives that make the collections meaningful to a wide range of audiences. Over the past year, this has included the professional photography and cataloguing of the eighteenth-century porcelain collection, now available online to support research and public access. Digitisation has also informed new Smartify content, enhancing object-based interpretation, audio tours, and digital learning. Alongside this, new curriculum-linked school resources have been developed, supporting inclusive learning across a range of ages and abilities. Guided tours, staff training, and interpretive materials ensure that conservation, research, and learning are clearly shared with visitors, both on site and online.

Severe weather is now a regular part of caring for the estate. After Storm Eowyn, the grounds team undertook extensive clearance works across the parklands, removing fallen and compromised trees along pathways and visitor routes.

This included the careful removal of a multi-stemmed Western red cedar at Lady Island, along with other storm-damaged trees, ensuring paths could reopen safely and the wider landscape could recover.

One of the most visible transformations in recent seasons has been along the main avenue. Over time, fast-growing laurel and snowberry had become dense and invasive, blocking light and obscuring the formal tree plantings that define the approach to the house.

With specialist equipment, large areas of undergrowth were cleared, restoring long views and re-revealing the original structure of the avenue. The result is a more open, legible landscape — and a renewed sense of arrival for visitors.

Similar work near the coach road entrance has reopened views towards the lower pond, while clearance in the woodland garden has created space for healthier growth and a more balanced environment.

Across the estate, growth is constant — and managing it is a year-round task.

Recent works have included:

• Annual cutting of the beech hedge maze

• Reshaping the Victorian-style laurel lawns along the sandy walk to the walled garden

• Removal of ivy from maze hedges, with help from Transition Year students

• Replacing a willow hedge in the playground maze where safety had become a concern

These interventions help keep historic features legible, accessible, and safe — particularly in areas used by families and children.