The Monsalvat Project will chronicle the conservation and repair of a 14^th century church in the small village of Hrusovany in Northern Bohemia in the Czech Republic - my aim being to convert this lovely and ancient, but abandoned, church building into a dwelling and studio. And while the Project may be said to have begun with my first sight of the Gothic church ‘Narozeni Panny Marie’ (Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary) on a spring afternoon in May 2008 (fig 1), its real origins lay in the long thought I have given to the endangered state of the many beautiful, but redundant and disused churches scattered throughout the Czech lands.