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

 

 

 

 

Defiant dandelions

Defiant dandelions

ivy-leaved toadflax carries its own stories

But mark yon small green blade, your stones between,

The single spy
Of that uncounted host you have outcast;
For with their tiny pennons waving green
They shall storm your streets at last.

FL Lucas, Beleaguered Cities (1)

you never know who might be watching

Sometimes blog posts seem to expect you to live on the edge of wide, wild open spaces, or to have a garden that sprawls like a city park when a lot of us have a back yard perhaps, a scrap of lawn or a window and a view of next door’s curtains….

I posted this entry on the CelebrationEarth! blog last week but I felt wanted to add it here as well....A walk round the streets where I live shaped the entries and gave me the examples I used. These ideas belong in a Creeping Toad space as well as a CelebrationEarth! one!

To be outdoors is just that and if you live in a city or town, try giving yourself time to really look at the streets where you walk and look for the evidence of the wildlife that shares our cities and the histories that we often miss.

Some stories are well known, their characters often seen - or talked about: urban foxes,  returning peregrine celebrities (with attendant online webcam followings...), city park tawny owls, (no? just listen, they are more often there than we realise), everpresent rats. But there are more....

Look down: a weed is just a plant in a place where someone doesn’t want it….but plants can sneak in anywhere. So enjoy your weeds and maybe they’ll become heroes.They have determination and an ability to grow in the most unlikely places from gaps between bricks in chimney stacks to the smallest crumbs of dirt between paving slabs or cracks in old walls

Look it up: find, photograph and name if you can (ask on line, try talking to friends on social media, use a plant-app). Then find their stories: cities are warmer habitats than the surrounding lands and often harbour surprising escapes…..

Hogweed jungles in abandoned industrial estates in east London

Himalayan Balsam started popping seeds along urban canals. And spread.

Plants often carry surprising stories. Look for Sweet Cicely  (Myrrhis odorata) along roads, and tracks and canals and railway lines: a fragrant, aniseed-scented feather of green and froth of cream that arrived in this country with returning Crusaders – or might have been brought by the Romans, crush a leaf and sniff it …(2)

Look round the corner: keep walking, turn a corner; find a street you’ve never walked down, a snicket, a close*. Even small towns hold secret places: odd corners, tucked away alleys, hidden courtyards. No, don’t start marching up people’s drives and don’t put yourself in danger but do give yourself permission to be curious and to take the road not taken

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The Road Not Take, Robert Frost (1)

Look down: watch when tarmac changes to flagstones to cobbles. Start questioning: look for the oldest road surfaces in your area…what does it tell you. There is a claim (argued about, disputed and dismissed and endorsed all at the same time) that the cobbles in the lane behind the houses on the other side of my road are actually Roman. I don’t know if they are but I like standing there and seeing some legionaries marching past,  two small children and a rangy dog sloping off to the market….no, I haven’t been arrested yet

Look up: take in chimneys: their shapes, their height, their state of repair, their decorations of jackdaw nests.

Look up: take in gargoyles and carvings and gate posts.

Look up: take in saints on churches or the spaces where they once were, stained glass, family crests, insignia

Look out: for patterned grates in walls, for wrought iron gates, for the textured wood of an old doors

Look down and think of the words the bears who wait for you to step on the cracks might be saying…..

I want to say, stop. Take photos. Sketch pictures. Do wax and paper rubbings. You might be able to do all or any of those things but they all assume a certain level of safety and access to relevant places and resources. It’s up to you: stay safe and be respectful of other people’s homes and personal space!

But do bring this home, bring home memories and thoughts and ponderings, take time to research – street names, house names, that odd plant. Learn their stories. Enjoy the streets where you live. Remember your walks as memory maps

Treat yourself (if you haven't already), buy a nice notebook to keep a record of your discoveries in, some tasty pens, coloured pencils. Write, note, sketch, scribble, stick...enjoy. Try the Papersmiths online shop for some options....even better if some kind friend will buy you these as a Distancing Present...

O, and graveyards? In many urban areas, these are the most significant green space after city parks and maybe abandoned railway lines…we’ll come back to graveyards in another post soon

*I’m Scottish: a “close” -  a narrow passageway between two buildings. The closes in Ednburgh are famous long flights of narrow stairs up ad down the hills of the old town.

1. The Poetry Foundation has a wonderful archive of poems to explore. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken

2. There are many books and websites that will give you the stories that plants carry, but as a starting point try the book Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey, published by Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996 - reprinted in various formats since

Celebration:Earth!

there is delight in everyday places.....

CELEBRATION: EARTH!

Taking time to pause: to reflect upon the world we live as part of, the world we are all working in different ways to protect and cherish. Celebration:Earth! sets out to invite people, to challenge groups, to reflect, share, celebrate their activity and to find new partners in environment, community creative and faith groups for the next steps they would like to take

From flowers for butterflies to solar panels, from a new pond to toad crossings, from a campaign to declare a climate emergency to convincing your neighbours to compost….

Is there an environmental success you would share?

From an atheist’s conviction, to an agnostic’s interest, a priest’s belief to a poet’s reflection

Is there a point of inspiration you act from?

Sunrise shining white through the mist that fills the dales, moonshine through clouds. Snowdrops. *

Is there a wonder that gives you strength?

Celebration:Earth! is a project based on hope and optimism. In these times of environmental despair and political melodrama, this project feels it is really important to remind ourselves of wonder. The anger and desperation that often marks environmental action might be great for immediate activity but to be lasting, sustainable and to empower its actions, we feel that environmental determination needs to come from a place of wonder and joy. We need to remind ourselves that this world is a wonderful place. Despite everything we are doing, despite the mess, it is still full of beauty and determination and life that just will not stop, and that can be what keeps us going

Supported by the Worldwide Fund for Nature, UK, and drawing together groups from across society, CE! is building a new network of partnerships of information and support, encouraging environment, community, art and faith groups to all find ways of working together. The “faith” element is important as when we draw on religious institutions or movements or eclectic anarchist networks, we can work with people whose motivations run deep, who can share a different set of perspectives from some of the familiar environmental ones, who care for spaces from small graveyards to tracts of open space and who are often already engaged in powerful environmental missions that the rest of us just don’t hear about

That’s what CE! comes down to: listening to each other: finding ways for groups to meet, to share successes and to find information or partners who might help them take their next steps, reach their next goals

village ponds hold treasures and wodners.....

Over the next few months we are finding people, challenging groups and inviting anyone to join in, building to a weekend gathering at St Albans Cathedral 18 – 20 September 2020 (see the website) but more than that, to connect, to share successes, to remind ourselves that there are good things happening. There is more action that is needed but there aren’t instant solutions and when we are shouting “we need X00 trees” we tend to miss the Y00 that are already being planted…..So how about stopping shouting and starting sharing.

and how can we not marvel at toads...

I am here as an artist – where art can be the vehicle that tells stories and that gives groups and individuals ways of expressing and sharing feelings

– as a pagan, because for me life in all its forms is sacred and I will (try to) work with anyone who comes to us open handed a

and I am here an environmentalist who can’t separate faith from science from creativity….

Within CE!, I am coordinating arts and education development and always looking for projects to share, people to talk to, connections to make

So how about it….

• Join the growing network
• Join us at St Albans (you’ll need to register)
• Tell us what you are up to
• Or just declare your own Earth Celebration event and find a way of sharing what you are doing with other people….they might come and help you or maybe you will inspire them to go and do something for themselves

determination in short grass

I don’t really care if people say this is too idealist to work (a recent criticism). We will only change the world for the better if we find ways of working together, if we learn to live and to think and to feel ecologically (experience the world as networks of connectedness) and I believe we need to remember that we live in a world that is worthy of celebration……

Rant over!

Visit the Celebration:Earth! website, or our facebook page (CelebrationEarth), or follow us on twitter (CelebrationEarth!)

Or keep an eye on things here…the CE! blog should be active soon as well

 

* I chose moments from this morning

 Photos: by me other than Toad's Eye: Kenny Taylor, and small toad in grass - Ian MacLellan - with thanks!