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

Eavesdropping

Sitting in a broch: 

the provocation of 

the overheard conversation

 

I admit it. I like listening in on other people’s conversations. Not the deeply personal, requiring-the-release-of-eavesdropping-mice, tucked-away-in-a-corner exchanges but those brash, loud and quite-possibly-intended-to-be-heard-by-strangers ones. And given that I am not all that inconspicuous, being some 190cm tall, extensively tattooed (if not always obvious), and excessively hairy (in some judgements), I seem to be quite good at being overlooked*.

In visiting a place, be it historic monument, ancient site, city park, formal gardens, rock on a beach or occasional tree, I like to just sit. To sit and soak up the atmosphere, to sit and feel the place around me, to sit and simply enjoy the moment. And eavesdrop.

The Broch of Gurness is a favourite loitering place for me when I’m on Orkney. 1000 years of settlement in layers and structures and precisely stacked stones, mortar free houses and wheel-houses and twin-walled towers of rock.

I watched. I listened. Standing in the centre of this dramatic site, this set of visitors could only talk about other places. Yes, I concede, without question, that the ancient tombs of Malta are wonderful but you’re not on Malta, you are here. Have you come to these islands on the edge of the world to stand in the midde of this broch and burble about somewhere else. And no. You’re not burbling about somewhere else. You are burbling about yourself in that other place. Is that the key? You can visit marvellous places as long as everyone knows it is you (or, in Scots, “yous” as in you plural) who is visiting. You are the centre of this story - the “you” in this instance being 4 people. I was there. I listened for all of the 15 minutes they were in the Broch. Not long, but quite long enough for uninterrupted monologue, and no-one seemed to even notice me (suprising, see parag 1 above, and add barefoot and crosslegged on the grass….ok, maybe “carefully not noticing wierdo in corner” counts as a survival strategy). But in that time, there was no reference to here, to looking at, enjoying, appreciating this place - or even comparing it to the Tombs on Malta. It was enough that here in this place everyone knew that yous had been Somewhere Else (within a genre)as well. Is a visit to a site like that just to provide a setting for broadcasting of your own experience?
O, it was dull. But intriguing in a dismal sort of way, so I waited and watched and listened and wondered if we would ever get to any perception of here. We didn’t.

This wasn’t a random monologue directed at the rocks, the winds and the wierdie in the corner. It could have been a closed conversation among the visitors concerned, but they seemed to have cornered a young man who I took to be the curator/guide/warden of the Broch (there had been a little notice in the window of the gatehouse: “warden on site”), but no, the young man being so informed and instructed was just another visitor. Maybe the warden had already escaped or was spreadeagled out of sight just over the cliff-edge waiting for the terns to scream an all-clear. I met the victim/subject later and we shared a quite, stone-filled moment of empathy.






 They left. I sighed. I think the Broch sighed, too. It’s seen worse after all. They left, with Birsay and Skara Brae and the Tomb of the Eagles to do as their declared targets in the next 2 hours. This would make for an interesting whirlwind tour of Mainland and South Ronaldsay especially as the tide was high and Birsay would be out of reach

Birsay causeway at high tide

This is a bit of a rant. Not really an angry one but more a recognition of a challenge. For those of us who try to educate and work face-to-face - but more for those of us whose interpretation has to do its job in our absence, there is a question renewed for me about what can we do to encourage people to stop. To simply stop, to shut up, and appreciate a place for what it is: not for its connections, its similarities to 6 other places I’ve been to and which might have been better, not for its amazing this or appalling that, not even for its story but just for its own sake.

Can we build a philosophy of observation into our work?

And I still wanted to slap those people with a bit of wet kelp.

And the great mountain
Is unconquered, when
It remains the victor
By not noticing the men

Nicholas Stuart Grey

* There is an activity I sue withg roups that amkes the point that being invisible isn’t about being able to hide, it is about beign able to become inconspicuous, see Celebrating Nature

Well-smoked and slightly confused

Well-smoked and slightly confused

at the Highland Folk Museum at Kingussie

last thoughts of a blackhouse on N Uist

I don’t know why these places feel so familiar, and so comfortable. I didn’t grow up in a blackhouse or spend my summers in one of those quaint 2-room tin-shack summer houses by a windswept western beach, but they feel so instantly familiar that I am left confused.

N Uist, looking out

 In the peat-smoked interior of the long, dark, heather-roofed house, the box-bed, the worn dresser, the enamel pans on their nails, I know them all. My grandparents lived in a tenement in  Campbeltown at the tail end of the Mull of Kintyre - the dead-end, they call it now although when we visited there, there was still an RAF base at Macrihanish and a ferry over from Glasgow. That row of tall houses, with their stairs worn into alarming ripples by years of shuffling feet and the outside loo where giant sea-slaters lurked in wait, is long gone. My memories are of darkness and dark uncomfortable furniture and a coal fire range and a tin bath and the cheerfulness of family and the stern-ness of grandparents who were yet indulgent. And the walk in the morning with a jug to the dairy down the road…
and i wonder if the furniture in that upstairs apartment was essentially that of any highland home or any highland couple of a certain vintage, a sort of standard set that might have been found in blackhouse, or croft or tenement apartment in Campbeltown

And that doll’s house of a seasonal home, corrugated iron and sleepers shaping two rooms and looking like the refuge of a maiden aunt. Perhaps that what it is: those clothes hanging behind the door could be her clothes, that coat her coat, the smell of soap, the pin-point neatness, the small ornaments, the understated evidence of a quiet life lived by being and not by owning, all this could be hers.

But I am still standing here in the Highland Folk Museum, blinking in the sunlight and heading for a bit of singing stillness in Leanach Church

N Uist, looking in

Characters for a new adventure

Papier-mache People of the Peaks

Borderland Voices

2^nd February 2016 

a gentleman awaiting his face and a tricorn hat

                         

Working with BV’s Tuesday Art Group in Leek, we have started shaping a set of characters who might have, should have, may once have, lived, loitered or even lingered in the Staffordshire Moorlands

we started with sketches and rolling and scrunching paper

Elbows, knees, hats and shoes and faces next week…..

ready for some clothes

 

elegance taking shape

Collections in the Landscape

Collections in the Landscape

Out of the thrilling store-rooms of the Museum where fossils rest in long trays and years of prints and paintings hang in sliding racks and a stray toad-man could be lost for centuries (I know. I tried. They found me.), Buxton Museum and Art Gallery is unfolding a new project that will offer a whole new set of ways of accessing

Dovedale

the museum from here, there and anywhere and will take those wonderful collections back out into the hills and caves and dales they came from.

A quote from the Collections in the Landscape blog

“Buxton Museum and Art Gallery is delighted to have been awarded a £869,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant to deliver Collections in the Landscape. The project will bring bring context and collections together to engage more people with their heritage. Our aims are:

• To improve public access to museum collections through development of virtual resources.
• To improve public access to museum collections through the redevelopment of the principle gallery, Wonders of the Peak.
• Enable schools and researcher to more effectively access and engage with heritage.
• Link collections and knowledge through a network of partnerships and volunteer programmes.
• To develop and share curatorial skills, ethical practice and digital media skills with staff, visitors, non-visitors and volunteers.”

Visit the Collections blog to find out more

Just now, what I want to say is that I’ve been asked to coordinate a series of events over the next 18 months or so that will take the CITL ideas and introduce them to people across the Peak District in engaging, creative and exciting ways

It’s great! I’m sidetracking myself into delighted flights of fancy and reluctantly deciding that we can’t really revisit plague and the medieval punishments of the Royal Forest of the Peak and acknowledging that dipping irritating visitors into petrifying wells might be fun but isn’t really “visitor friendly”.

So we are distilling ideas down to an ongoing set of excitements. I’m gathering a team of artist, photographers, ancient technology specialists and trouble-makers (Oo! Another excuse for those medieval punishments!) to help me and we’ll set a series of public events, schools sessions and more intensive learning days in motion.  I’ll post events as they come up but to whet appetites, over the next 3 months there will be

         The Last of the Wonders: 23^rd December 10 – 1pm in the Museum: telling tales of the Peaks and inviting visitors to share their stories of the exhibition, drawing their own cards to keep and leaving us notes, comments and stories in our “Book of the Wonders”. A final event for this version of the display before it is redesigned and reinvigorated

         Marvelous Minerals: February 2016: a day of crystals and colour, looking at the mineral worlds of the peaks and the secrets that grow so slowly and reveal such spectacular colours in our caves and tunnels and long, slow-dripped caverns

        

Bone Detectives: March, 2016, for British Science Week: inviting visitors to discover the secrets of the skulls and spruce up their natural history skills: looking at shapes and structures and adaptations in skulls and discovering how these give us clues about the animals and their lives even if we are not sure what the animal might have been. Our friends in local group Stone and Water have received a Science Week grant towards this event so we can do more! Play with more bones, Admire more skulls! There will be a public event, a workshop for adults during the week and an evening visit to a group of scouts, guides, brownies – or similar – we’re taking offers if any local groups see this!

More details of all of these and the next set will be posted very shortly!

Sacred Land: inspiring communities

Exploring the sacred in the city

Tuesday July 7th, 2015

Bristol

 

old walls hold older stories

I have an old friendship with Martin Palmer and the team at the Alliance for Religion and Conservation. Their work is inspiring and provoking (in the best of ways) all at the same time. We have slightly over-excited meetings full of inspiration and ideas that don't always get anywhere but were good to have had anyway.

 (*I haven't got any Bristol photos to light up this post, so I'm going to add some favourite ones from other places!)

 

from holy buildings...

Here, however, we've dug a chest of treasures out of the storied sands of Bristol. We have two events in July that set out to introduce visitors to the sacred landscape of Bristol. And it is there (so forget that cynical sneer!), lying in the street patterns of the medieval city, in the precise placing of its churches, in the stories behind street names. It is even there in the overlap with Feng Shui traditions of a culture that at the time must have seemed fabulously remote

 

....to holy wells

St Anne's Well, Buxton

As well as exploring the city (the afternoon event), we want to work with participants (evening event) to think about ways of engaging people with that sense of the place: historical, spiritual, natural, built: an ecology of communities that should make somewhere special of a city. We'll talk, share ideas, consider themes that intrigue, activities that involve, traditions to cherish or to wake…join us for a rich and rewarding pair of sessions….You could book into either or both events.

For more on these events, take a look at the Sacred Land Project.

To book, please contact Pippa Moss on 01225 758004 or arcworld@arcworld.org. 

singing the wells, Buxton

July 7, 4pm to 6pm Walking Sacred Bristol, a guided tour through the ancient landscape of Bristol from a Chinese, Christian and pagan perspective. Limited places available. The walk will be led by Gordon MacLellan and Martin Palmer. Cost £12 per person. Meet at St Stephen’s Church, Old City, Bristol.

July 7, 7.30 p.m. Sacred Land: inspiring communities workshop £5 per person. St Stephen’s Church Bristol. PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A ONE OFF AND WILL NOT BE REPEATED. From medieval churches to modern chapels, Chinese dragons and the flow of qi, ancient stones to local woods, this workshop will explore ways of involving communities in their landscapes. Using case studies and sheer imagination, Sacred Land: inspiring communities will offer themes, activities and events to inspire people to look at the world around them in new ways. Mixing Christian, Chinese, pre-Christian and secular perspectives, this workshop will give participants a chance to think, plan and hopefully find new and exciting ways of drawing people into those local special places. And also simply be inspired themselves.The workshop will be led by Gordon MacLellan and Martin Palmer.

sometimes there are boggarts

• Gordon MacLellan is a storyteller (“Creeping Toad”), artist and creator of celebrations. With an international reputation, his work finds ways of helping communities explore the relationships between people, places and wildlife. His most recent book is Old Stones and Ancient Bones: Poems from the Hollow Hills. Gordon is an animist shaman following a path that draws him into relationships with landscapes – urban, wild and countryside alike – alive with the presence of spirit.
• Martin Palmer, is a theologian, author, broadcaster and environmentalist.  He is Secretary General of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (www.arcworld.org) and author of more than 20 books on religious and environmental topics such as Faith and Conservation and The Atlas of Religions. His work on sacred sites worldwide has won. He has advised UNESCO on World Heritage sites and has helped the World Monuments Fund with protecting endangered sacred sites. His book, Sacred Land (which decodes Britain’s extraordinary past through its towns, villages and countryside), is published by Piatkus/LittleBrown.

Book of the moment: Counter-tourism, the handbook

Counter-tourism, the Handbook, Crab Man, Triarchy Press, 2012

ISBN 978-1-908009-86-9

www.countertourism.net

Here is a treat for anyone who has wandered round a historic site, bored by the expected and provided routes and interpretations. Counter-tourism is a challenge, an invitation and a license for the gentle naughtiness of doing the unexpected thing. Walking through the rooms of some stately home at your own unpredictable speeds, seeing how much dust you can collect, wandering round the outside of a property....the principles embedded here are about independence, imagination and personal experience. A lot of these activities remind me of how young children get to know a place. They wander. They run or walk or just stop and look under beds and wonder about secrets, treasures and horrible hidden stories 

There is an underlying cynicism about the heritage industry: 

“Visitor centres are machines for the contraction, disguise, obscuring 

and hollowing out of the places they propose themselves as portals to”. 

Maybe not entirely fair - we all know of effective interpretation that invites us in and welcomes us to a place without controlling too much and limiting our experience too much (or I hope we do!). And that perspective may upset some professionals, seeing themselves as skilled interpreters of a place, the people who know best.  But the theme here (that I endorse fully) is that visitors deserve the freedom to take what they will from a place, echoing arguments that people learn what they want to learn and learn best when they are choosing their own learning styles – and also that every site offers far more to experience than we offer in our planned interpretive and educational experiences. (And if that ruffles a few interpretive feathers, they probably needed the ruffling!)

People explore places in their own ways and these books champion that independence. Counter-tourism offers visitors some sneaky alternatives to the often controlled and sanitised experiences we are offered at sites, inviting us to find our own ways of getting to know a place. And for all those professionals who reckon they've got their interpretation processes sussed, these books challenge us to explore sites in new ways, offering activities to shake conceptions a bit. 

So have a read, have a think, wander, try and do, use these activities or just relax into some new ones of your own – as an interpreter, as a visitor or simply as someone out to get to know this world we walk on.

Counter-Tourism, the Handbook, Crab Man, Triarchy Press, 2012, 

ISBN 978-1-908009-86-9

Counter-Tourism, A Pocketbook – 50 odd things to do in a heritage site, Triarchy Press, 2012, ISBN978-1-908009-67-8

Tactics for Counter-Tourism – 31 short films by Crab Man and Siobhan McKeown: www.countertourism.net