Lost Castles - make your own!

Lost castles

Build a castle, build a tower, build a landscape

where adventures might happen….

 

Make your own medieval world: a castle, a cathedral, a palace, the lost houses of your town?  Mixing history with stories, invent a world of strange and wonderful places; with towers and drawbridges, secret passages and hidden treasures, moat, dungeon, dragon or despair. Let your medieval imagination get carried away and make a pop-up castle to take home.

 

This is an online event for the Festival of Archaeology. It is also a Celebration:Earth! event, reminding us that the world we live in now has grown out of centuries of stories and adventures. There is a short film of this activity on the Buxton Museum and Art Gallery page if you'd like to watch rather than read

 

Do some research first? Have a look at pictures of castles or palaces or whatever it is you would like to make! Find out about their features and use that information. Look at the shapes of windows and doors, craving son walls, statues. Could you show where an oubliette has been forgotten? Where a garderobe disgorges? Can you sneak in a sally-port

 

We’ll describe this activity as if we’re making a medieval castle. You could take the same idea and make a Roman fort or a beautiful church, a palace or a witch’s exciting house

 

 

Now, flex those imagination muscles, exercise your scissor fingers and your colouring thumbs and join us to build a castle, build a tower, build a landscape where adventures might happen….

 

 

You will need

·      A piece of cardboard: white A4 or A3 is best but this activity will work with cereal packet card as well or anything that you can cut and roll without it cracking

·      A piece of stiff card as a base

·      Scissors

·      Ruler

·      Felt pens or colouring pencils

·      Sharp scissors

·      Small ball of modelling clay

·      PVA glue

·      Masking tape

·      Craft knife and cutting mat

·      A magazine with pictures to cut out, or tissue paper or wrapping paper

·      Barbecue skewers (one for each puppet character you want)

Picture: Low storycastles 1

 

 

Step 1. Getting ready

Use the ruler to draw a line maybe 2cm in from one of the long sides of the card (line 1). Take the rule in another 3 or 4 cm and draw another line (Line 2)

 

Step 2. Drawing the castle

Above Line 2 draw your castle: think of it as a castle unfolded so work your way right across the card. There might be towers and battlements, and another tower, and a hole made by a cannonball. There might be arched windows, a door, arrow slits. Use Line 2 as a guide and don’t draw the top of your building further down than that line. If you do, you might weaken the whole castle. Don’t draw below line 1 – that will be used for something else

 

Step 3. Cutting out and colouring

Cut out the castle. Cutting out windows: you might recruit a grown up with a craft knife and a cutting mat, or if you sit your castle shape so the window you want to cut out is on top of that lump of modelling clay, you can safely push the pencil through the card and into the clay. Give the pencil a wiggle. This should give you a big enough hole to slide some small scissors in and then you can cut out the window yourself.

Colour the castle in: completely? Or just draw in stones and ivy and decoration? Up to you!

All done? No! add a little bit more! How about some glitter?

 

Step 4: all decorated and looking wonderful?

Now cut tabs along the lower edge of the castle, cutting up to Line 1. Do your cuts about 2 cm apart

Run some glue along one side of the castle, then roll the other side round so they just overlap. Carefully press into place. Maybe use a bit of masking tape to hold it together while the glue dries or staple it if you have a staple. Carefully, fold the tabs out so that your castle will stand on the table with its tabs spread out like little feet

 

Step 5. Stand that castle up!

Turn your castle upside down and put a small squidge of glue on each tab. Gently stand on the castle on the tough card. You might need to adjust things a bit so that it stands straight and proud. Then press the tabs down. More masking tape will hold them in place while the glue dries. Now, rather than having a castle standing in a muddy cardboard square, decorate the castle surround with scrap paper or torn up magazine pictures or whatever (we sometimes use green sponges for bushes, grey ones for stone). There might need to be a paper moat) draw your own crocodiles or piranha perhaps). Step back and admire! You have a castle!

 

Characters

Having a castle means you might need a story to tell. Use some of your left-over card (or find some more) to draw someone to send on an adventure. Stick them onto a barbecue skewer (if it is very sharp, you could snip the point off with a pair of scissors so it is less likely to stick in someone!)

 

Extra elements: if you started with a larger piece of card you could use that to make the outer wall of you castle while a smaller piece of card could be used to make a keep inside the courtyard of the larger piece. Experiment: can you add a drawbridge?

 

 

We made an adventurous explorer. We added a dragon. There might be treasure?

 

If you want some help with characters, there is a pdf attached that you should be able to print out of explorer children and some castle people. Castle characters sheet

 

 

 

 

She woke as the ice melted

memories of the Goddess of the Waters of Buxton

For the first time in many years, Buxton's wells will not be Dressed this summer. In response to this, the group Two Left Hands is promoting an alternative, more distanced set of Garden and Window Dressings, while Stone and Water are adding an alternative Tiny Well Dressing for window ledges

Follow the links above to find out more about all these lovely things to be part of. Within the Tiny Well Dressing activity is a reference to this poem...so here is the whole piece. It was written for Buxton Museum and Art Gallery as part of the Collection of the Artists project.

When Buxton was at its "visit to take the waters"  height, there were people who attended the wells, dipping cups into the water for visitors. Memories of the priests who served visitors before even the Romans came and called our town Aquae Arnemetiae (Waters of the Goddess Arnemetia - or Arnemecta)? I always wondered if Arnemecta Herself quietly stayed on, stays on, here among Her Waters, changing shape, changing face, to suit the moment and the needs of the time.

AS LONG AS WATERS RUN

 

Long skirts rustling on cobbles

A hat tipping, a cane tapping,

The bath-chair creaking,

A wheel squeaks.

 

Cross my palm with silver, lady,

Cross my palm with copper,

Cross my heart with happiness

And I’ll share this water with you.

 

The world sighed into warmth,

Old memories waking grass and flowers,

Remembering trees.

The hills relaxed long shoulders as the weight lifted.

And She woke as the ice melted,

As the water

Seeped, dripped, dribbled,

Nibbled itself a hollow,

A bedchamber for a fairytale,

In the darkness under the hills.

 

Born old, She sits on a limestone shore,

Watching waves that beat no more,

Watching rocks

Drip teeth,

Growing fangs in ancient gums.

Peacock ripples of Blue John

Shifting into the folds and pleats of her gown.

 

Cross my palm with silver, sir,

Cross my palm with copper,

I’ll dip a cup and offer you

Your good and growing health.

 

A haggard old woman

In a poke-bonnet cap,

Dipping water in a tin cup.

A chalice,

A Samian bowl,

A Bronze cauldron,

A birch bark beaker, curled, folded, pinned,

Cupped hands,

Will all receive the blessing.

 

Stone spirit,

Water spirit,

Goddess of the caves,

Healer to the Living,

Midwife to the Dead,

Receiving them back into the life-giving darkness.

Holy hills, and

A holy well.

A Celtic grove,

A Roman temple,

A saint’s bath for

The Mother of the Mother of God.

 

And then,

Old Martha offers water,

A penny a jug.

Cross my palm with silver, lady,

Cross my palm with copper,

Cross my path with happiness

And I’ll share this water with you.

 

And now,

Sitting on the Slopes

As the snowdrops ring in the spring

A life in bags around Her on the bench,

Gap-tooth smiling at strangers,

Welcoming anyone, everyone,

To the waters of Her well.

 

I take no money now, miss,

I take no alms nor offerings,

But waters flow as they have always flowed                      

And blessings run as the water runs

And the Wells bring hope from the dark of the hill.

 

 

Coins, fossils, toys, shells? Make your own museum!

Make your own museum

from your own small treasures

Over these weeks, in conjunction with Buxton Museum and Art Gallery and Stone and Water, I have been working on a series of posts inviting people to “Make Your own Museum” at home.

 

• Do you collect small treasures?
• Do you find fossils or stones or shells on walks
• Do you pick up feathers and snail shells in your garden
• Do you find old coins, toys, cogwheels, ribbons and shoelaces?
• People collect all sorts of things!
• Perhaps you have a collection of treasures that you cherish. Why not turn them into your own museum: store them, display them, write about them?

 

Recognising that many of us collect things: from the small and delicate (cowries, groatie buckies), to the living (are you a cat man, a dog woman, a rabbit boy? A runaway hamster girl? All of the above? Or just into unicorns?) to the large, the bulky, the awkward and the exciting; for those smaller bits that fall off the back of the bookcase and are never seen again, we are inviting you to create your own sort-of organised displays

 

Sort-of, because this will be your museum, personal, idiosyncratic, distinctive and as organised or disorganised as you want it to be (look at PittRivers Museum in Oxford for “the only sort-of organised personal collection that grew”. If you are a young person, don’t show your parents. They might panic)

 

Rather than doing all the posts again, this blog will be a signpost to point you to the different elements of the Museum for you to go adventuring in

 

a) Part 1: making display trays from old greetings cards

Blog of activity: https://buxtonmuseumandartgallery.wordpress.com/2020/06/02/make-your-own-museums-at-home-part-1-boxes-for-small-treasure/

Youtube link: make your own museum part 1

 

b) Cabinets of Curiosity: gathering trays together into exciting cases:

Activity description: https://creepingtoad.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-museum-in-box-activity.html

There will be a museum blog and a youtube film

 

c) Guiding people through your wonders: labels, guidebooks and maps

 an activity post to follow, links will be posted here

 

d) Looking at your whole house as a museum? Try looking at this lovely blog for ideas: A New Direction

 

 

Buxton Festival Fringe

This Make Your own Museum sequence is also part of Buxton Festival Fringe’s 2020 online activities. As we cannot deliver hands-on, face-to-face activities in the Museum during this year’s Festival, this set of activities become part of our distanced gift to you all.

If you would like to explore what other gems the Fringe has to offer and to explore the socially distanced activities and performances that we are managing to deliver, visit the Fringe programme

 

Buxton Museum in the Fringe

We have another Buxton Museum/Creeping Toad event online: Lost Castles will help you create your own strange, wonderful, marvellous, storyful palace, castle, landscape, storyworld...in miniature and you could follow the activity in a film here

And yourselves?

If you make something, devise something, shape something, laugh a lot, why not tell us: send us a photo of your collected Cabinet or of the horror/delight/disgust of visitors to your museum, make a 1 minute tour of your museum on a phone and send that in as well if you want to

We cannot promise to publish everything but we would love to see hear and delight in your own creativity

 

Send photos etc to toadwords@btinternet.com