Warm flesh on old bones

Warm flesh on old bones

Telling the stories of a museum collection

One story began in a box of bones on a tabletop.

A second began under the table with a mantrap’s rust.

A third  began on a windswept hilltop where a grass-grown ridge hid an ancient story of pain and sorrow.

Event: Arbor Low on a misty Midwinter morning

I have worked with Buxton Museum and Art Gallery on and off for some 17 years now. Activities have ranged from writing the poetic version of their audio trail to running events that have wandered from lantern making to crystal growing, puppet mammoths to the precise drawing of Victorian designs and random mermaids

In 2016, the museum was closed for a refit funded by the Heritage Lottery. As part of that Collections in the Landscape project, I was asked to coordinate a programme of events that took the collection out into the landscapes it came from. (Just Derbyshire, no thrilling field trips to Egypt or the fossil beds of the mid-west USA). We took fossils to limestone gorges, brought a handling collection to the local Victorian garden, unwrapped geological specimens in dripping caves. As the CITL project developed a second Collections project also grew.

Six artists working in different media were brought in to respond to themes within the collection. With museum being closed and galleries up for redesign, there was time to pause and reflect, a chance to look at different ideas. There was a potter, a visual artist, a sculptor, a textile worker, a musician composer and me as a storyteller and a poet. I can’t speak for the others but for myself “The Collection of the Artists” went abruptly from being enjoyable and entertaining to, like the skeleton from Liff’s Low*, being very personal, very telling. Still enjoyable. Still rewarding. But with bones enough to shake a soul.

 

tools fanned across centuries and lives

walk, wander, listen

My challenge within the project themes was to explore “home”, in particular the shift that must have – might have – presumably – came when Mesolithic wanderers became settled Neolithic growers. There was a question about a sense of belonging to a place, to a neighbourhood and not to a journey, not to a migration across landscapes. These were the people who went on to raise Arbor Low and draw lines and alignments across the Peaks mirroring the changing patterns of the skies.

So, I sat and turned over bones in my hands. I gazed into the eye sockets of the ancient dead. I worked with children from Biggin School below Liff’s Low’s hill and we talked about life here thousands of years ago. We could become his family. We could tell his story. Our story of him. Of course, it was our story of him! Of course, all the other pieces I wrote were my stories of them. I am a storyteller, not an archaeologist. I am also a zoologist so every so often my analytical, natural history head speaks up – and gets over excited at auroch’s bones or the proximity of a cave bear skull. But I am a storyteller. In this context, my job isn’t to tell the science story, it is to remember – and to remind other people – that these were people too, to wrap bones in warm flesh, to imagine lives and let them live again in words and the images those words create.

exploring with friends

And pulling a skin curtain against the wind,

We are as hefted to the hills as our sheep.

(from: Becoming Home, G MacLellan)

Collection of the Artists was a Buxton Museum and Art Gallery project supported by Derbyshire County Council, Heritage Lottery and Arts Council, England. The finished pieces by the artists are on display (or can be heard) in the Wonders of the Peak gallery in the Museum. Lullaby of the Larks, an exhibiton of photographs, paintings, installation and musics from the Collections projects, by Kidology Arts is on at Buxton Museum until 24th November. Details, here

More of my work from Collection of the Artists can be found in a booklet: Tales from the Wonders that is available from the museum shop or direct from me (£3.50 including P&P within UK)

The project as a whole can be explored on the Museum site, here

Your museum: if you would like that personal story touch in your collection – or are interested in an event or longer project, drop me an email and we can have a chat

*Liff’s Low: a tumulus excavated by Bateman in the 1860s. The skeleton taken from the tomb is a key part of the new Wonders of the Peak gallery

LIFF’S LOW NIGHT CHARM

Do not fear the darkness,

As the firelight dies,

My little horse girl.

Your father is a wolf,

And the night

Holds no fear

For the hunter.

Do not fear the cold,
As the firelight dies,

My little fox boy.

Your mother is a bear,

And the cold,

Is never cold,

Under fur....

The opening verses of a lullably written with ideas from the children of Biggin Primary School. Full Charm can be found in Tales from the Wonders

stories the bones told me

Tales of the Wonders

a world of cave bears and shadows

booklet £5.00 (includes UK P&P)

from creepingtoad@btinternet.com

During 2017, I was one of a team of artists working on an Arts Council England funded project at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery. “Collection of the Artists” invited us to respond to the museum’s collection creatively, exploring different themes through the artefacts in the museum and the local landscapes they came from

COTA has drawn to a close now and the finished works can be seen in the museum or accessed through its digital platforms (see list below).  I joined the COTA team as a storyteller and poet and had cheerful times talking to visitors, working with schools and other groups and simply sitting with bits of the Collection or wandering across hills and hiding in holes to listen to the stories the bones were telling me….

The resulting work from me can be seen in the Museum, accessed through the digital platforms (see the Wonders of the Peak app) or you can get your own copy of the collection either direct from me or from the Museum
As a taster, here is one of the pomes from Tales, for the stories you need to get the whole booklet!

Revealing

Time gently and untidily shelves

The memory of

Barrows and tunnels,

Treasures and tollroads,

Until all that is left

Are the bones and bits,

We sift from the debris of centuries

And the ghosts of facts,

And the stories we tell .

“Tales of the Wonders” is a 24 page A5 booklet including a selection of stories and poems inspired mostly by the prehistoric sections of the collection. My theme was “home”, wondering how people made new connections to places as wandering mesolithic peoples settled into our Peak District landscape as farmers and hunters, leaving marks on the landscape that we can still find and visit today. How did the Peaks become “home”?

Here is a story of the fox cubs who first found closed-in Fox Hole Cave as a sanctuary. Here is the last day of the people of Fin Cop and a Neolithic lullaby from Liff’s Low. There are poems from the waters of the Buxton and the old woman wandering the Gardens here who has been prehistoric healer, Roman goddess and Edwardian well-woman. Here are cave bears and compasses and walking away from the wandering herds….

Doxey Pool and storyteller, photo by Adrian Lambert

The COTA team

• Potter Caroline Chouler bound bone from Fin Cop into bowls 
• Richard and Amanda from Kidology, played the dreams of cave lions and landscapes and captured the precision of crystals
• Textile artist Seiko Kineshito has hung the colours and textures of the peaks in a cabinet
• Metalworker Simon Watson shaped ideas into bronze
• I was there as a storyteller and poet
• and photographer Adrian Lambert had the challenge of catching us doing all of the above!

Times takes all but nothing keeps

Caves, stones and ancient lives

Unfinished Poems project at

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery 

We are reaching the end of this first run of the Unfinished Poems project and here are a few choice pieces from the final sets of postcards…

Stone Age Tools
A hammer blow splits flint from stone,
A firebow wakes embers from the wood,
A bow shoots,
Ochre colours random glazes

 



Victorian Archaeologists
Shovels and spades dig piles of earth
Burrowing into the ancient mound
Mud and mess and graft and toil
All that work - but nothing found
(by BW 14/11/17)

Caves
Rain falls and water drips,
Stone dissolves and water seeps
Bones remain but not the lips,
Times takes all but nothing keeps
Caves
Rain falls and water drips,
Stone dissolves and water seeps
Swells the trees in apple pips,
And roots delve further in the deep.

Caves
Rain falls and water drips,
Stone dissolves and water seeps
This process continues while we sleep,
Years and years pass by,
Then something bright catches our eye
A fossil so old,
A crystal bright and bold
If only we knew what stories these hold.
(by SM Dowle 1/11/17)

Over the last 4 months, a set of postcards of Unfinished Poems has lurked in Buxton Museum and Art Gallery inviting people to connect poem to exhibit to imagination and and find their own words to finish the poem, or to ignore the starting points completely and write a completely original piece. As these Finished Poems have reached me, I have been posting them on this blog (while exercising a degree of editorial control). Out of an original set of 160 postcards, we’ve had 50 back - a good return. The rest are hopefully whispering their finished poems out there in the wider world beyond the walls of the Museum.

In the next couple of weeks, I’ll post the best of the rest of the poems and a fulls et of Unfinshed Poems so that if you feel so inclined you could complete them for yourself

With many thanks to these poets and everyone 

who has contributed to the Unfinished Poems collections. 

More poems will follow

Pictures: the drawing came with the Stone Age Tools poem

The waterfall and cave pictures are from Linn Caves near Milngavie - not Derbyshire at all but I liked the combination of water, stone and darkness 

Leaving memories

artwork by Victoria Brown

Unfinished poems, 3

more poems from 

the Buxton Museum postcard project

as part of the Collection of the Artists project at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, I have a set of postcards at different places round the exhibiton.  Each postcard has 2 lines as starting points for poems about aparticular aspects of the exhibiton and visitors are invited to complete the poem - and hand it in, or keep it for themselves - or send it to a friend.

Over the last few months, several sets of Unfinished Poems have been posted here....enjoy this latest set!

17. Limestone

artwork by Victoria Brown

Ancient waves on forgotten seas,

Left seaweed and shells on prehistoric sand,

St George’s mushrooms grow by rowan trees

And years have drawn their patterns on 

23. Limestone

Ancient waves on forgotten seas

Left seaweed and shells on prehistoric sand.

So too our lives ebb and flow

Leaving memories within our minds.

Will it be our thoughts survive

As fossils in a future heartland?

by Florian Barker

18. Stone Age tools

A hammer blow splits flint from stone,

A firebow wakes embers from the wood,

And as I walk alone

Through woods, grass and stone,

Memories keep flooding back

Of when I was lying in the sack

19. Stone Age Tools

A hammer blow splits flint from stone,

A firebow wakes embers from the wood,

A bear roars for his grub

A hunter looks desperately for a stone

and this is a vcave bear skull

20. Cave Lions

A bear in the darkness growls,

A lion watches from the cave,

A wolf in the distance howls,

A couple of owls having a rave

21. Cave Lions

A bear in the darkness growls,

A lion watches from the cave,

The wolf howls

The deer listens but is he brave

To wander in the forest alone?

22. Cave Lions

A bear in the darkness growls,

A lion watches from the cave,

And as the lion is on the prowl

He grabs a child which screams and howls

24. Coal measures

Giant dragonfly wings flutter,

Over the swamp of a tree-fern wood,

The newts and the frogs moan and mutter

In the space where the trees once stood.

25. Coal measures

Giant dragonfly wings flutter,

Over the swamp of a tree-fern wood,

The newts and the frogs moan and mutter

Where the amphibian stood.

26. The Buxton Mermaid

Travelling wonder, a sideshow delight

In fish and bone and monkey leather,

My path links the underground rivers and pools of the Peak,

I’m the mermaid of the heather

27. The Buxton Mermaid

Travelling wonder, a sideshow delight

In fish and bone and monkey leather,

This is a creature you must not miss,

Like modern mermaids, all artifice.

by Susan Crane

29 Caves.

I am a droplet

Hurtling down

The sun beams my rainbow

I hoop to the ground,

In a pocket of limestone

I shiver, freeze and thaw

And seep through the rock

Through the caves

To the core.

with many thanks to all our poets 

- more (un)finished poems will follow soon

artwork by Victoria Brown

A purple shimmer with peacocks

A purple shimmer of Blue John,

a peacock flare hidden in crystal :

the Unfinished Poems project at

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

Dig and chisel and quarry and flake,

Polish black or shimmer blue,

Of languid tale or unslumbering wake,

Minerals glinting with a different hue,

Of rock and earth for sorrow or mirth,

For times gone by and of memories new.

(Laura Huxford)

The Collections of the Artists project is reaching its final stages now. Exciting pieces of work are poised to appear among the treasures of the Wonders of the Peak gallery in Buxton Museum and Art Gallery.

this landscape offers a lot

I have been writing poems and stories inspired by the collection. There have been earlier pieces here (links at foot of page). One of the latest pieces I have been working on is not a single bit of writing but is rather a set of unfinished poems: 2 lines that might provoke a response relating to different aspects of the collection. There are 8 of these poems, printed on postcards with a picture to colour in and some possibly useful words scattered around, inviting people to complete the poems as they explore, colour in the picture and send the postcard to a friend (but hoping they will send us the poems as well!)

The first poems are coming in now so I thought I would post these and invite readers of the blog to add their own responses to the opening lines. You may never have seen our Galleries but then you might have your own history of over-enthusiastic diggers, beautiful stone and prehistoric tool makers…

There are 8 Poems in the set: I’ll do the 3 here that we’ve had responses to and post others over the next couple of weeks

(uncredited poems are ones handed in by visitors with no name attached)

If you do write your own completed poem: send it to toadwords@btinternet.com

I can’t promise to use everything but will try to

Ashford Black Marble with inlaid decoration

DECORATIVE STONE

Starting points here are the Ashford Black Marble pieces and our Blue John carvings and window

 

these are the line drawings visitors have been colouring in

2. Dig and chisel and quarry and flake,

Polish black or shimmer blue,

In everything I seek,

None can compare

To the Wonders of the Peak

(Anon)

Unfinished poem:

Dig and chisel and quarry and flake,

Polish black or shimmer blue

Useful words: new, wake, make, bake, flew, blew

 

those cairns didn't stand much chance

VICTORIAN ARCHAEOLOGISTS

A lot of our collection grew from the efforts of those Victorian enthusiasts who went out across and under the Peaks

3. Shovels and spades dig piles of earth

Burrowing into the ancient mound

Where my ancestor lies undisturbed

Until I pull him out.

(Anon)

 4. Shovels and spades dig piles of earth

Burrowing into the ancient mound

A spade is a spade by no other name

So, it is plain to say, just shovel away

(Anon)

Unfinished poem:

Shovels and spades dig piles of earth

Burrowing into the ancient mound

Useful words: worth, hearth, treasures, found, ground

STONE AGE TOOLS

And largely as a result of those Victorians above, we have a large collection of prehistoric tools including delicate Mesolithic flints that lie like notes on the staves of their display cards. There are careful arrowheads, polished stone axes and more…

 

mesolithic flints

5. A hammer blow splits flint from stone,

A firebow wakes embers from the wood,

A knife splits flesh from the bone,

The echoes sound throughout the wood.

(Anon)

6. A hammer blow splits flint from stone,

A firebow wakes embers from the wood,

The branch bends, the sinew sings,

That flint on an arrow

Brings the goose to the fire

And the family rests.

(Creeping Toad)

Unfinished poem:

A hammer blow splits flint from stone,

A firebow wakes embers from the wood,

Useful words: moan, groan, alone, bone, good, food

With many thanks to the writers, known and unknown, of our finished poems!  

Blogs connected to this proejct:

http://creepingtoad.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/collection-of-artists-writing-starts.html

http://creepingtoad.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/fin-cop-pausing.html

Always room for mermaids

Grendel at Easter

Lively events over the holidays have set Creeping Toad up for the next few weeks

tissue flower and visiting dragonfly, Rudheath

There were several days in Rudheath, making flowers and finger puppets, growing our own tabletop garden of card butterflies and tissue flowers

it is surprising how many sharks swim in Northwich

colour your own bear

There was a day at Chatsworth for Collections in theLandscape, joining others from the museum team to help colour a life size drawing of a bear, to play the DNA of cave lions as music, to handle prehistoric tools and speculate wildly over the dog skull still embedded in its mud (we are a bit afraid that if the mud is ever removed the whole thing ill just fall apart!) – and we were all distracted by the baby rabbits tumbling down the slope behind the Stick Yard. O, and with me, there were cave lion puppets to make, and sabretooths and mammoths and horses….

And then there was Eostre and time to look at Anglo-Saxon images: jewellery, carvings and stories. We looked at images from the Beeston Hoard, from Sutton Hoo, and slipping period a bit, added Celtic ring brooches and a torc or two

We got a bit carried away…there were the beginnings of new sagas

the lost Penguin of Saxon sagas

dragon

A fierce family of Giants,

stomping across the countryside

are stopped

by a boy with a pen.
The goat is watching.

 ~

A dragon comes flying at midnight,

spouting flame and fire,

Scaring animals into a barn

Hiding the stars with smoke,
While the goat watches.

~

There was a dragon who hoarded gold

~

Dribbling blood and spitting fire,

giants

Grendel’s Mum comes howling across the moor,

Six arms waving, four legs pounding,

She sharpens her claws on stones,

And waits

For Grendel’s Little brother to catch up.

Beowulf was wrong.

~
And out deep and mysterious, the eye of the goat is always open*

Grendel's Mum

There will be more events over the next few weeks: details will be posted!

and there is always room for mermaids

* No, I don't think anyone really understood where the Eye of the Goat came from but that young artist was very determined that this was important!

Fin Cop, pausing

Fin Cop,

pausing on a hilltop

 

the day began in mist

The forgotten dead lie under grass this wide hilltop. Walls divide the space. There are gates and stiles, a steep slope sprouting trees, crowded. Older trees, broad-beamed and statuesque mark half-forgotten field boundaries. The clouds had descended that morning before we walked this way, wrapping distance in mist. It lifted as we climbed, the sun drawing shadows, flaring moss into jewels, revealing a wider horizon so that, at last, on the edge of the cliff we saw old neighbours – Burr Torr and Ball Cross, Castle Naze on Combs Moss, Chelmorton Low. Mam Tor was a distant suggestion,  a darker grey within a grey shadow. The River Wye far below curled round the foot of Monsall Head, glittering down towards Ashford-in-the-Water.

But the nameless dead lie here, lay here, discarded, for 2,000 years*. The same could be said of so many places in these crowded islands. There are plague villages, settlements, battlefields, burial fields, small camps, old barrows. Some lost, some known, a few excavated, most not. Just there.

To get over-excited about a single hill-top seems a bit unreasonable. Down there, peering over the edge of the scarp, just down there is a Roman-British settlement. It must have its own dead. And up in Taddington Dale, near the bypass, is Old Woman’s House Cave where Stone Age families lived and presumably died. Then there are the 19^th century railway tunnels boring through the limestone hills to connect Buxton to Bakewell, opening the dales, offending Ruskin. How many deaths went unremarked then? No big tragedies, perhaps, but how many stray navvies fell, or died under that single rockfall, the slipped pickaxe, or breathed too much of that lung-rotting limestone dust. Turn again, and down there is Litton Mill, stylish now, nightmarish once for workhouse children. And there’s Taddington where they slept between sufferings. So many dead here. We live in a well-used land, a richly deceased landscape.

But the quiet, sad story of Fin Cop commands attention. It was a lost story. There seems to have been no tradition of what happened here or what lay, lies, under the grass. Names often hold clues but here, Fin Cop: the end of the hill? Or Finn Low – the mound of the fiddler Fin, or something to do a bit obviously with the Celtic hero Finn. Pennyunk Lane that brings us here from Ashford might have meant “the head (as in top of a hill) of the young man/young/youth”. But it might not. And for centuries nothing much happened here. There are earthworks, early Iron Age embankments. Traces, ripples now are all that remains in the fields of earlier burial mounds. Then there were later lead mining and limestone digging and firing in kilns. There are walls. And cows. And a forsaken hillfort commanding stunning views. But after that day, that night, it looks as if no-one lived here again. Still don’t.

I’m not feeling particularly reasonable just now. I’m standing here on the hilltop, on the cliff edge, turning slowly, counting deaths. There’s not much to see, tumbled embankments, a ditch and a dyke, doubled here, lost there. The stray pimples of those robbed out barrows. But trenches on a dig here found bodies and the site promises, threatens, more*. The scientist in me wants evidence, needs to know, needs the next trench. The storyteller feels the tale, looks at landscape, at bones and shapes a story of death and fear and scrabbled survivals on a rock scree slope. The shaman in me feels presences, the forgotten dead, the abandoned dead who no one honoured, no one named, the dead who were simply left.

“Tarans” we call them in Scottish stories – the unnamed souls of lost children. I find myself whispering. I pledge an evening with a single flame, a gathering fire to warm old bones, food offered, a libation to share, a space to sit, a listening ear, an attentive heart. I’ll hold a space, a stillness. That is the invitation though I know no-one may come.

* This was not intended as a report of the excavations. This is a report of a storyteller’s visit to the hilltop. You can find out more about the tragedy, horror, massacre ( what do we know?) of Fin Cop, here

(http://www.archaeologicalresearchservices.com/projects/fin-cop-hillfort)

http://www.archaeologicalresearchservices.com/projects/fin-cop-hillfort

When Buxton Museum and Art Gallery opens again in May 2017, you will see some of the finds from the recent digs, and ancient deaths

“Collection of the Artists” is another project under the encompassing umbrella of Buxton Museum and Art Gallery’s Collection in theLandscapes project. While the wider project is supporting the redesign of the Wonders of the Peaks gallery, the digitising of the collection and my own work with events – taking the collection out into the landscape, CotA is probably quieter. There are 6 artists, working with an Arts Council England grant to explore and respond to the dynamic of the Museum’s collection and the landscape it was largely drawn from as artists.I'm here as a storyteller and poet. My work for the museum is largely under embargo until project completion, so pieces like this one and the recent Bertram, Beeston and artists are sideshoots of the ongoing process

Richard and Amanda from Kidology have posted another Fin Cop blog, why not take a visit and have another view of the hill and its story