King Charles III's appearance on BBC Repair Shop show puts monarch's Ayrshire estate on the map
dailyrecord.co.ukAn Ayrshire countryside estate which champions heritage crafts has been put firmly on the map as it received prime-time telly viewing last week.A spotlight was put on Cumnock’s Dumfries House last Wednesday as the country estate — owned by King Charles III — featured on BBC’s The Repair Shop, which sees expert craftsmen restore heirlooms and treasured antiques, giving them a new lease of life.The repair team were invited to meet King Charles, then Prince of Wales before his accession to the throne, on the estate and restore two unique items — an 18th century bracket clock and a Wemyss Ware ceramic vase, made for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee.The team of furniture restorers Jay Blades, Will Kirk, ceramics restorer Kirsten Ramsay, and horologist Steve Fletcher also met and worked with some of the students and graduates on The Prince’s Foundation’s building craft programme — a training initiative that teaches traditional skills such as blacksmithing, stonemasonry and wood carving.Dumfries House’s collections manager Satinder Kaur, who lives in New Cumnock, helped to select the items for restoring, provided background history to the cast and crew, and even got to drive the objects down to the repair barn.She is in charge of around 1,000 objects of artwork, clocks, furniture and ceramics on the estate, including 59 pieces of Chippendale furniture — roughly 10 per cent of the overall known Chippendale furniture in the world.Satinder said: “It was nerve-wracking but it was also really fun to spend time with each of the experts and spend time in their area of expertise.“The experts weren’t particularly nervous meeting the King — or the Prince as he was then — but I think it was really exciting for them to be in Dumfries House
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