This year we successfully introduced a 3D stone carving course to compliment our existing stone carving courses that cater for all levels of experience focusing on creative carving and sculpture, the traditional skills of masonry, and the discipline of letter cutting. We continued to offer our successful have a go and beginner’s courses that help students gain basic skills to progress to our other courses. We continued to develop and run courses that related to not just the use of Purbeck Stone but also that utilised the amazing Purbeck Environment and history. These courses included drawing, creative writing, and geology each of which took the unique landscape and geology of Purbeck as their inspiration. We also for the first time included sessions in geopoetry into our offerings.
In keeping with our educational aims to bring knowledge of Purbeck history and geology to both the local population and visitors we managed, with the help of a grant from Dorset National Landscape Community Access Fund, to create a new walking trail from the coast via Burngate to Corfe Castle. The “Quarry to Castle” trail, using existing footpaths with the cooperation of the National Trust and other landowners, was fully way-marked and included information boards, physical maps and brochures as well as a QR link to download this information. This development has successfully raised Burngate’s profile in the local community.
In our attempts to become more integrated with the local community Burngate participated in a number of local projects. These included supporting the reconsecration of St Nicholas’ church in a local village by giving stone carving demonstrations in the church grounds and running an associated stone carving project with Years 5 and 6 at the local primary school.
We were granted funds by Worth Matravers Parish Council to support places for socially disadvantaged people on our courses.
After the success of the previous year, we again participated in the Purbeck Art Weeks (PAWS) event which was combined with our stone carver’s open event. This popular event held over two weeks was well attended by stone carvers and attracted a good number of visitors who were able to see stone works of art being created by skilled craftsmen.
Again, in co-operation with the National Trust, we are developing a series of memorial stone seats that can be purchased by the public and sited at meaningful locations within the NT estate.
In our endeavor to gain more national recognition we sponsored and ran stone carving workshops for the Geological Society at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London. This was at their ‘Earth Canvas’ event and received widespread acknowledgement through the pages of Geoscientist magazine.
We continued to achieve revenue from the letting of our venue and the hire of stone carving facilities to individuals and groups.
In this operating year The Purbeck Stone Centre Trust Ltd has once more experienced change to its Trustees. A trustee resigned due to other commitments but fortunately we have managed to recruit a talented and well know local artist as a replacement.
We have also been lucky in our recruitment of volunteers.
The search for additional trustees and volunteers is always ongoing and it is hoped that as our local involvement expands more local people will be interested in joining.
Trading this year has been more difficult with numbers and revenue down. Our expected participation in the National Trust Corfe Castle festival did not materialise which hit our revenue but we were very fortunate that this was made up by a donation from a trustee and his wife.
We have been able to report a small trading surplus but are very aware that we need to strengthen our trading position for the next year by adjustments to our business model.