Great Coxwell Barn was built in the early 14th century to store the agricultural produce of land belonging to the Cistercian monks based at Beaulieu Abbey. One hundred and forty four feet long and thirty eight feet wide, the barn has a roof whose age, design and scale is without compare in the UK. William Morris, a regular visitor to Great Coxwell Barn, described it as “the finest piece of architecture in England”, ...... “unapproachable in its dignity, as beautiful as a cathedral, yet with no ostentation of the builder’s art”. Long admired for the quality of the craftsmanship employed in the construction of its Cotswold rubble stone walling, the roof structure and Cotswold state roof, over the last one hundred and thirty years the building’s requirements for repair have been met with approaches remarkable for their sensitivity. In the ownership of the National Trust since 1956, the latest of these repair programmes has been overseen by the Practice. Over the summers of 2001 and 2002 the Practice directed works incorporating external fabric repairs, the introduction of a lightning protection system, the execution of stone tile indent repairs to the internal posts and a programme of internal and external archaeological investigation. In addition to minor repairs to and replacement of the Grade I listed building’s rubble stone walling and the stone slates of the roof, the major external fabric repairs concerned the repointing of wall faces. In an effort to retain as much of the historic mortar, raking out was kept to a minimum and a ‘micro-pointing’ technique used to fill small voids. After extensive research an aggregate that exactly matched the Barn’s medieval aggregate was eventually found. Extracted from a narrow underwater seam in a local quarry, a quantity of this highly shelly Farringdon Sponge Gravel has been stored by the National Trust specifically for future use at Great Coxwell Barn.