Cornwall Heritage Trust has received a revenue grant of £50,000 from the Garfield Weston Foundation.
A small independent charity, Cornwall Heritage Trust works to preserve and strengthen Cornwall’s unique heritage through its grant schemes, education projects and the managing of 16 historic sites across Cornwall. These sites, which include Tregonning Hill, the Hurler Stone Circles, Castle an Dinas, and Treffry Viaduct, are all open to the general public and free to enter throughout the year.
The money will support the charity’s focus on increasing the number of “At Risk” historic sites that it owns and growing the capacity of its in-house sites team to ensure that they are managed appropriately and sympathetically towards both their natural and historic environments.
Cornwall Heritage Trust CEO, Cathy Woolcock explained: “This grant from Garfield Weston Foundation is fantastic news and will help progress our sites management enormously. Many of Cornwall’s historic gems are under threat. 246 places in the Duchy are currently listed on the Heritage At Risk Register, a number which is woefully under-representative of the true scale of the problem. Cornwall Heritage Trust is the only organisation in Cornwall actively seeking to save these sites, improve them and share them, free of charge, with the general public. With the cost-of-living crisis and the historically low wages in Cornwall, cost is a huge barrier to accessing heritage, and that’s why our work to protect and offer universal access to them is so important.”
The grant will also help build the charity’s growing education programme. This specifically aims to offer a wider cross-section of children and young people the opportunity to experience Cornwall’s heritage for themselves whilst also being accessible to all, especially those in deprived areas.
Cathy continued: “We believe that engaging with children and young people and inspiring them to learn about Cornwall’s heritage is one of the most important parts of our work, and this grant will also make a huge difference in developing our education programme. This ranges from growing our new selection of school workshops to creating more free resources and information guides which aim to make visiting our sites as easy as possible for as many people as possible. For a small charity like us, the importance of a grant like this is huge and we are extremely grateful to the Garfield Weston Foundation for its support.”
