How to preserve/extract lime plaster with writing? (UK)
So my parents own an 18th century farm in England and the most exciting part (in my opinion) is The Graffiti Room™ which is covered in scribbled names/dates, poems and prose. The oldest one I think we've found is early 1800s (not including the one that says something like 600 BC).
It's a grade 2* listed building and the walls are lime plaster. The problem is that the walls would fall apart if we tried to take them off as they are, but we want to preserve the historical graffiti.
We have a stone mason/art history friend who talked about using a papier mache style preserving technique, but wouldn't that mess up the graphite?
Any ideas or contacts would be amazing for us to look into. Many thanks!
Edit: we're happy to take these walls off completely as we know how difficult it would be to retain the work while repairing it. But just hoping to preserve the pieces for history in some way, even if that means framing & displaying them or giving them to a local museum.