Stonemasons, historians and forty student volunteers have returned 1,400 carved stones to the tower that has watched over the Great Lawn since 1892.
A tower rebuilt stone by stone
When a routine survey in 2023 found that frost had split more than a third of the tower's limestone, the college faced a choice: patch the worst stones, or take the upper stages down and rebuild them properly. The Fellows chose the second, slower path.
Each stone was numbered, lifted by crane and assessed in a temporary workshop on the North Field. Where the original could be saved it was cleaned and repointed with lime mortar; where it could not, masons cut a replacement from the same quarry that supplied the chapel's builders.
Students on the scaffold
Forty students from the History, Engineering and Fine Art programmes joined the project for credit, recording every carving before it was moved. Their photographic survey is now part of the college archive and has already turned up two masons' marks nobody had noticed in 130 years.
We were not just watching the restoration. We were the people writing down what the tower had been.
The chapel reopens for Evensong on Sunday 4 October. The tower stair will be open to visitors on the first Saturday of every month.
