Above all, keep it dry and give it a bit of ventilation. Ideally, if you’re storing rope for a long time out of use, it should be in loose open coils. In practice that’s usually impossible!

We don’t like the “chain stitch” method for storing natural fibre rope, because it tends to set the rope into a wrinkly series of kinks - but it works fine for some synthetic ropes. And after years of doing it, we’ve abandoned coiling natural fibre ropes because it tends to increase twists and kinks in the rope, and they can cause unnecessary and unwelcome tangles.

We now use the folding method, just folding the rope in half and half again until it comes down to a reasonable size. Then we wrap one end around the rest, and there are plenty of ways of finishing off... It helps if, when you make the first fold, you leave a foot or so of one end longer than the other, because that gives you more wrapping material at the end.