21st century connectivity for a historic castle

Business Profile

Set in the peaceful Wiltshire countryside beside a lake, Old Wardour Castle, near Tisbury, was once one of the most daring and innovative homes in Britain. It was built in the 14th century as a lightly fortified luxury residence for comfortable living and lavish entertainment.

An English Heritage site, today the castle ruin provides a relaxed, romantic day out for couples, families, and budding historians alike.

Business Challenge

English Heritage cares for over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places - from world famous prehistoric sites to grand medieval castles, from Roman forts on the edges of empire to cold war bunkers. Through these English Heritage brings the story of England to life for over 10 million visitors each year.

For the English Heritage technology team remote site connectivity is one of their biggest challenges. Like any modern business, visitor attractions need good connectivity. From ePOS solutions that run tills and payment entry devices, to security systems and connecting laptops to English Heritage’s corporate network, even a 14th century building needs a 21st century internet connection.

Located in the beautiful Wiltshire countryside, near Tisbury, Old Wardour Castle’s remote location means that the only connectivity available to the site was a slow and unreliable copper line, insufficient for all the applications needed. However, upgrading to full fibre at a historical site presents significant installation challenges.

The Solution

Passionate about connecting the countryside, Wessex Internet takes full fibre connectivity to remote rural locations that other providers are unable, or unwilling, to go.

Having connected a farm just under 1km from the castle, we completed a challenging build across the historical site to extend our ultrafast network to the castle.

A route was planned around the car park to the entrance of the visitor centre, where an existing manhole and ducting installed by English Heritage could be used to reach the site’s comms room.

As the car park has not been excavated previously, it was possible there could be historical artefacts underground. Wessex Internet usually installs full fibre using vibratory moleploughs and directional drills which minimise disruption, but these could not be used as there was a risk of potentially damaging artefacts that the operators could not see underground.

Therefore, the company adapted its installation methods, carefully digging a 750m open trench across the site, supervised by an on-site archaeologist throughout the installation.

The Results

Old Wardour Castle now has a 100Mbps Ethernet Leased Line, delivered over full fibre infrastructure. This is future-proofed and can be upgraded to up to 10Gbps if required in future. With a financially backed guaranteed uptime and fix time on faults, the English Heritage team at Old Wardour can be certain that vital services like ePOS and fire and security alarms are always online.

“Remote site connectivity is one of our biggest challenges. A local fibre connection, instead of a slow and unreliable copper line, will make a huge difference to the site.” - Barry Larkins, IT Operations Manager at English Heritage