This week a team of 100 people are hard at work restoring two of Maidstone's most historic buildings - including one which used to house a saint's finger.

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has been running its week-long summer restoration camp at Boxley Abbey with volunteers practising their skills at gauged brickwork, wood hewing and lime-making among many other tasks.

Two projects, each one once part of the medieval abbey, are being worked on simultaneously.

One is the Grade II* listed former St Andrew’s Chapel in Boarley Lane, Boxley, known as the Old House Project, which once housed Sandling Village Post Office.

The other building only a few hundred metres away is huge. It is thought that it may once have been the "hospitium" for the many pilgrims visiting the abbey on their way to worship at the shrine of St Thomas a Becket at Canterbury.

A hospitium is a hospital in the medieval sense of the word, as a place where visitors could find rest and hospitality. Or the building may simply have been a large tithe barn for sheltering the abbeys's animals and storing its crops. It may have been both, with the pilgrims staying on the upper floor above the animals.

SPAB, which was founded in 1877 by the textile designer and conservationist William Morris, hopes the building's history will become clearer as their work progresses.

Boxley Abbey was a Cistercian monastery founded in 1146 and colonised originally by monks from Clairvaux Abbey in France.

It was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537. The abbey building was largely demolished and the remains converted into a private house, but parts of the gatehouse, the perimeter wall and various features of the monks' gardens remain, in varying stages of decay.

The hospitium or barn is owned by the Best-Shaw family who currently live in the abbey house and whose ancestors have owned the estate since 1890.

St Andrew's Chapel, which is a little more modern, dating from 1484, was also converted to a house after the dissolution. It was once owned by the Tudor poet Thomas Wyatt and was said to house an important religious relic - the finger of St Andrew. It was largely occupied by tenant farmers until around 1890, when the tenant then in residence, one Frederick Mannering, opened a grocery shop in part of the premises.

Later, probably around 1931, the shop became the village post office and functioned as such until 1969.

Since then, the building, which is Grade ll* listed, had been left to rot and was placed on the national Heritage at Risk Register.

SPAB purchased the building for around £60,000 in 2018.

Their aim is two-fold. SPAB wants to sympathetically restore the building, using traditional building and craft techniques, so that it can become a home again, and thus secure its long-term future.

At the same time, it is using the opportunity to teach restoration techniques to its volunteers and students to ensure traditional skills are not lost.

This week a team of 56 volunteers, seven staff, eight fellows and scholars from the SPAB training scheme and 29 specialists have been working on the site.

They have come from across the country and are sleeping in tents amid the trees in the orchards of Boxley House.

The Best-Shaw family have made the team welcome, providing meals for them - and in return SPAB are working also to restore the hospitium.

SPAB spokesman Felicity Martin said: "There's a lovely communal feeling, especially in the evening with everyone sitting around the camp fire."

But SPAB and the volunteers have taken on a Herculean task. Ms Martin said: "When we first bought the house, it was so over-grown with vegetation, you could hardly see it."

In the last two years, the vegetation has been cleared away, and the Royal Engineers - who also lend a hand every year - have temporarily buttressed one side of the building that had started to bulge outwards.

Importantly the roof has been repaired to ensure the building is water-tight and doesn't decay further.

Ms Martin predicted the restoration would take at least another five years. She said: "SPAB is very happy to do everything slowly, because we want to do it all properly."

This week a number of tasks were going on.

One team was repairing part of the abbey's garden wall and elsewhere were cleaning old mortar of the brinks of a collapsed section of wall so that they could be re-used in its repair.

On another part of the site, a team was "soft-capping" a stone wall.

Boxley Abbey has been listed as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, the highest level of protection, not only for its own importance but also because it is known there were earlier settlements here dating back at least to Roman times.

SPAB has now started three archaeological digs at the potential sites in the field to see what can be revealed.

Grahem Keevil is the man in charge of this section. He said: "Whether what's down there is medieval, Roman or something much more modern, we don't know. But it shouldn't be more than a few feet below the surface, because the survey equipment doesn't penetrate much more than that. We could dig down with a bulldozer in no time, but we are doing it by hand and going very carefully to ensure we don't harm anything."

Mathew Slocombe is the national director of SPAB. He said: "We're really thrilled to be here at Boxley Abbey."

"Our aim is to repair the building of course, but also train, to promote learning and to bring people together both locally and nationally.

"We're really delighted to involve people in the work that we are doing here."

The public can follow the progress of the restoration project by visiting the SPAB site here.

No-one knows what happened to St Andrew's finger, but Boxley Abbey also had a second attraction that used draw in many pilgrims - the Rood of Grace.

It was a crucifix but the amazing thing was that Jesus's hands, feet and eyes could be seen to move and he even wept tears.

At the dissolution, King Henry's men discovered the miracle to be a con trick; the monks were working the moving parts by wires.

The Rood was toured around the marketplaces in the county, including Maidstone and Rochester, to show people how they had been fooled, before finally being taken to London where it was broken up and burnt.