Big cats and prehistoric mice

Big Cats and Prehistoric Mice

The Lost Cats of Buxton

Final events

 

The Lost Cats are growling, prowling, purring their way through these last weeks of winter and gathering their muscles for the leap that will land them in the middle of St George’s Day on 23^rd April. This is also the weekend of Earth Day and rather than marking the death of a dragon, we are celebrating the richness of wildlife that reaches from the days of our lost cats (up to 100,000 years ago) to today and the woods and hills, the rivers, meadows and mosses of Derbyshire

 

There are school workshops snarling their way through this week and next, and then there are public events where you could come and join us!

 

At other times you could

walk an imaginary cat through the woods

·      Visit the Museum and look for the bones of a Cave Lion’s leg

·      Sit in Grinlow Woods and imagine the wonder of a cave lion wandering through

·      Walk along Spring Gardens and think of the ghosts of ancient cats peering in the shop windows!

 

What’s coming up?

This is a heads-up post – details will follow but why not get these dates in your diary or stuck on the ‘fridge, or written on the walls of your cave-home

 

Sunday 2^nd April

Lost Cats and prehistoric mice!

At the Pump Room, Buxton

Design and make your own prehistoric mouse or a streamer cat on a stick! (and no, we didn't really think there were scimitar-toothed mice but we loved the idea...). More details here: Prehistoric mice!

 

Tuesday 4^th April

Wild Cats in Grinlow woods 

Mask making and then we challenge to wear your masks in the woods and get some photos of the Returning Cats of Derbyshire. Details and tickets:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/wild-cats-in-grinlow-woods-tickets-594585921497

 

 

Thursday 13^th April

Giant Cats and More Mice

Help artists from the Babbling Vagabonds to make a life-size cave lion puppet…and make more of those terrifying prehistoric mice to take home! Details on Museum events pages soon

 

Sunday 23^rd April

Carnival of the Cats

Our final day, when we invite everyone who has joined in activities already – and anyone else who hasn’t! - to join us for a Parade of Lost Cats, Giant Cats, Prehistoric Mice, puppet Snow Cats and Garden Tigers along Spring Gardens and into the Pavilion Gardens

Maybe bring a picnic to relax in the gardens afterwards

Maybe make the most mouse-like cake you can to tempt a Cave Lion into sitting beside you…

Maybe just enjoy a catful of colour of shape and creativity

 

Details for all these events will follow soon!

 

Lost Cats is a Creeping Toad project for Buxton Our Street in partnership with Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, Buxton Civic Association, Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust and the Babbling Vagabonds. WE are part of the big, brave and adventurous Wild Escape...but aren't sure if we want our Lost Cats remembering they are Big Cats and escaping along Spring Gardens....

 

Well-wooded Words: a Buxton Poetry Trail

Well-wooded Words

18th and 19th July 2015

a poetry trail through Grinlow Woods 

during Buxton Arts Festival

a delicate moment from the 2014 Art Trail

weaving words through trees and bushes, 

poems through the flowers

inviting visitors to wonder as they wander

to enjoy the richness of the woods, 

the beauty of stone 

and to touch the emotional heart of their summer

In a companion trail to this year's Grinlow Art And Storytelling Trail (website on its way, meanwhile you could visit the facebook page), we are inviting poets, scribblers, scrawlers and storywriters to submit pieces for a trail of words and wonders through Grinlow Woods

The Art Trail and its attendant activities were a great success last year, so we thought it would be good to add another strand to that creative woodland experience.

“We” are Stone and Water, the Buxton-based community group who celebrate the richness and creativity of the Peaks through projects like Exploring With Stories and Ancient Landscapes. 

We are looking for pieces (poems or prose) that might 

• draw their inspiration from Buxton and the Peak District 
• provoke reflection about the area 
• use these landscapes to challenge reader’s own perceptions of themselves
• or something like that

So we invite you, challenge you, to share your enjoyment, your passions, your delights and your despairs of, from or about the Peaks and send us your words for the Grinlow Poetry Trail

our Trail won't take us into the caves but your poems might grow
from those beautiful underground palaces

FINE DETAILS (and some small print!)

What will be happening?

On the weekend of the Art Trail (18, 19 July 2015), our poems and stories will be laminated and presented through Grinlow Woods in Buxton Country Park. The Poetry Trail will follow a similar route to the Art Trail (see below). There will also, hopefully, be storytellers performing, poetry/writing workshops, make your own woodland book activities and perhaps some poetry readings (let us know if you’d like to be involved in that)

Our trail will have its own map and possibly a booklet (available to buy) of all our juicy poems and stories

How long a piece can you submit?

We are allocating each writer the equivalent of 2 sides of A4 (so please, no monstrous tomes or Homeric epics!) and in a largish font, maybe 20pt, for ease of reading. If you're not sure, just send your piece in and we'll advise. Of course you don't need to send in that much: if you compose precise and elegant single haiku or tanka, maybe just one will say exactly what you want. At the moment, we will only accept one submission (ie one longer piece or several short poems) from each poet. If space arises we might invite more contributions from existing Trailers

Where will our poems be?

The Trail will wend its way up through Grinlow Woods from the Visitor Centre car park towards Solomon Temple (but will probably stop just short of the upper edge of the woods

Until we see what is coming in, we can't say where pieces will go. if you have a piece that definitely needs to be displayed by rocks, or a park bench or an oak tree, say, let us know

Complementing the Art Trail

Our poetry trail will run along a similar route to the Art Trail. Poems do not need to associate with artworks unless you want them to. We don't really know what other art is going up until the last minute so we cannot advise you of what's going to be around. If you know an exhibiting artist, why not scheme wildly with them, keep us in the loop, and it might all be wonderful when we display words and visuals together

Filthy Lucre

We are not planning this as a money-making activity but we would like to generate enough cash to design and print poetry trail maps and maybe produce that booklet of poems for sale. We are asking for a contribution of £10 for each submission (ie for each poet's contribution not for each individual poem). Don't send any money with your submission. We'll contact you about money and other fine tuning when your contribution is accepted

Being organised and officious

And we're sorry to say this but there will need to be a bit of editorial control here: please don't send in anything offensive, or discriminatory. Our boundaries are very flexible but there are limits and we will reserve the right to simply say "no". We'll try not to, but that reservation needs to be there

First deadline: we need to have a working set of poems by 31st March 2015: enough for us to know the plan is viable
Second deadline: assuming we get enough poems to make the Poetry Trail viable, we'll go on taking new submissions until the end of May

Submissions:

email your work to

Gordon MacLellan: stoneandwater@btinternet.comPlease send it as an attachment in Word or TextMake sure: your name and contact details are also on the attachmentBy post: to  Creeping Toad, 51-d West Road, Buxton, SK17 6HQ
and we'll be in touch!

Grinlow Woods, paths to wonder

So! flex those fingers, ink up those quills, 

charge up your keyboards, knot your strings 

and carve your runes

Running towards adventure

the adventurers gather

 A week of activity! In our Exploring with Stories project, we had planned a lively week to coincide with National Family Week - then that was cancelled but our events went ahead anyway!

In the last few days, we've had swarms of people out looking for Faeries, Trolls and Goblins in Padley Gorge near Hathersage. That was such a magical and perilous time that photos will follow later when we have determined that they are safe from spells and that to look at them will not risk enchantment and having all of you turned into frogs (not necessarily a bad thing, I hasten to say, but we have to observe some proprieties)

weaving baskets

Dragon Girl tells her tale

Wednesday was flooded. The woods where we hoped to go Into the Woods were waterfalls, and rivulets and our heroic artists dripped within minutes. Visitors had more sense and stayed at home. We surrendered the day to the rain and its thunder

cooperation is needed
when building dens

soft, damp moss for pillows 

But to-day people gathered to Run Away to Adventure and in Grinlow Woods we heard the tale of the dragon who, after killing the crabs, chased the girls who had been looking in rockpools off the beach  and into the woods where they built a den that was so well-hidden no dragon could see it.

Then there were the family who were on a holiday sailing down the Nile when their boat was overturned and abandoned by search parties, they made a camp on the banks of the river. Braving crocodiles and hippos, they caught fish in the river and made friends with local people

a shelter with all modern conveniences

The stories span on, watchtowers on the heights, the nutriritonal value of toasted biscuits, a branch polished smooth and pale that looked suspiciously like a giant's thigh-bone, baskets to collect fruit in, the best ways of cooking rabbits (especially oens made of moss and bark!), wet clay lamps to light the dark, wild nights, the relative merits of logs and bracken as bedding…….

and on the banks of the Nile...

Books we used

Places we went to for ideas in planning these sessions

Into the Woods:

TH White, The Sword in the Stone

East, Maddern & Marks, The Spirit of the Forest

Julia Donaldson, The Gruffalo

Jane Gifford, The Wisdom of Trees

JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

toasting biscuits?

Run Away To Adventure

BB, Brendon Chase

JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

Michael Morpurgo, Kensuke's Kingdom

Ray Mears, Essential Bushcraft

Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins

Swiss Family Robinson

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

the watchers on the hill