Boscastle

On the Sunday of the Pagan Conference, we all went down to Boscastle for the day. Boscastle is a small coastal village which is home to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, and they had agreed to let Conference goers into the museum free when we showed them our badges.
There are a lot of artefacts relating to the history of witchcraft, and information on famous witches of the past. One room is done out as a typical witch's cottage, with a tape on in the background talking about charms and spells. Upstairs is a case full of 'poppets' with pins in them - one sad case was a doll dressed as a nurse, with a nail through her belly, apparently made in 1941 by a nurse who had become pregnant, and who was hoping to cause a miscarriage.
Everywhere we looked there was something interesting, like the figure with a goats' head mask, holding a stang, (a sort of trident cum pitchfork) which was used in ritual magic.
It's a fascinating place, and we didn't really spend enough time there, because the Gloucestershire Pagans had booked lunch for 1pm at the nearby Cobweb pub, for 26 of us. The carvery was pretty good, and the pub itself was all flagged floors, low beams and local beer.
By the time we'd finished lunch the weather had worsened, but I was determined to get to the end of the harbour. I left my friends either sheltering in a gift shop or struggling along the path behind me, while I leaned into the wind, felt the hailstone coming in horizontally on my face, and danced along the path to the first harbour wall.
Up there, even I thought it was too windy to go any further, but I did take a photo to prove I'd been that far:

Back in the village, I treated myself to a yarn bowl from Roger the Potter at Boscastle Pottery. It's decorated in their unique mochaware style (with the use of a secret herb to make the tree like markings on the purple and green glaze). I've already used it to keep my ball of wool from rolling around the floor while I'm using my lucet.

The Horniman Museum

I've been on my holidays, and doing some research for my latest story.
It involves the Order of the Golden Dawn, and I knew that they met at what is now the Horniman Museum, back in 1896. So that was the first place to look at.
And it just shows the value of going to the places you're researching, because the original villa no longer exists. The original Museum was opened in 1890, but the collection continued to grow, so in 1898 a new Museum was built on the site of the house in Forest Hill, which opened in 1901. There are also extensive gardens - a Farmer's Market was taking place by the bandstand when we were there - and the museum has had various extensions over the years.

Here's the mosaic over the original entrance (the Young Man remembers going in that way as a child) and the bandstand, which has a fine view over the city.

So we had fun looking round the free exhibitions - the music gallery underground is absolutely brilliant, crammed with all sorts of instruments from all around the world, including experimental instruments like a harmonica/flute. We also said hello to the walrus, in the middle of the natural history gallery, which is famous enough to appear in a mural under a bridge near the station.

I'm going to have to use my imagination for the scenes in my story that take place at the Horniman residence, though, since the house no longer exists.

The Horniman family were tea merchants, as shown on a brick frieze further down the hill:

It's quite long, and seems to show scenes related to local history.

The Herschel Museum of Astronomy

It's quite a small garden, behind an elegant terraced house in Bath, just out of the centre. It's not the sort of place you'd stumble across by chance, unless you were very lost! But this is the garden - this very spot - where William Herschel pointed his home made telescope at the night sky and discovered the planet Uranus. The discovery doubled the known size of our solar system at a single stroke.
What made it even more impressive was that he was self-taught. He was actually a musician, directing the music at the Octagon Chapel, composing and playing various instruments including the organ. As time went on, he spent more and more time on his astronomical research, including building telescopes - which included polishing the mirrors laboriously by hand, after casting the metal for them in his little workshop (the flagstones are seriously cracked due to an explosion with the molten metal!).
When he settled in Bath, he sent for his sister Caroline from Hanover to join him so she could run his household. He taught her English, and music (she was a fine singer, apparently) and mathematics, and she assisted him in his astronomical researches. She discovered eight comets herself, and was the first woman to be awarded a gold medal by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1828. She was also the first woman ever to earn a wage as a scientist.
One of her dresses is on display at the museum - she was tiny! Yet she lived to the age of 98, having moved back to Hanover on the death of her brother.
By this time, they had left Bath behind. King George III was so enthusiastic about William Herschel's work that he offered him £200 a year to move close to Windsor to devote himself to astronomical research where the King could visit him whenever he wanted. It was a significant drop in his income, but William didn't hesitate - he moved to Slough, and built a telescope so big it was marked on ordnance survey maps as one of the wonders of the age.
Down in the cellar of the house, they show a little film narrated by Patrick Moore, who was the Patron of the Museum. In the film, he describes William Herschel as probably the greatest astronomer of all time - and if Patrick Moore thought so, that's good enough for me. He built around 400 telescopes over the years, finally inventing a polishing machine for the mirrors after 15 years of doing it by hand. He also discovered infra-red radiation, while working with prisms, and coined the word "asteroid", among his other accomplishments. He also had wonderfully clear handwriting - several of his letters are on display and they are perfectly legible (I often have trouble deciphering old handwriting).

And here they are together - William looking up at the sky, and Caroline writing it all down - in a shady corner of the garden.

Museums Are Not a Luxury, Either

I've been pretty much ignoring the news over the last week, in favour of visitors - my sister and her family came in their camper van, and my Young Man was here at the same time. One thing I did notice, though, as we scrolled through Facebook one day, was the threat to the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, which may be forced to close because of cuts to the budget. Manchester, of course, is one of the heartlands of the Industrial Revolution. The cotton mills are long gone, but it is still important to remember what made Manchester so important in the past - and doubly important to show advances in science and technology to the public. This is the sort of thing that can inspire our next generation of scientists and engineers - but how will they be inspired if they are unable to find out about it? This is not some little local museum, either - it's nationally important.

The MOSI is in the same group as the London Science Museum, the National Railway Museum in York, and the National Media Museum in Bradford. Of these four, it is thought that the Media Museum in Bradford is most likely to be closed - even though it gets 500,000 visitors a year, this is less than the other museums in the group. But it is more important to Bradford than the Science Museum is to London - London has a wide variety of attractions and opportunities to find out about science. Bradford - not so much, but in this era of electronic entertainment, the history of photography, film, TV and video games is relevant to everyone's lives, and it's something that all Bradfordians seem to be proud of.

In Herefordshire, meanwhile, all the local museums are under threat of closure - though locals are fighting back against an uncaring council that sees them as unimportant. The costume collection is regularly consulted by people from places like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia - it's been quite interesting to see letters from the US in the pages of the Hereford Times on the issue.

Meanwhile, there seems to be plenty of money to spend on a new museum in honour of Margaret Thatcher - fifteen million pounds, in fact, supported by David Cameron in the pages of the Telegraph.

Isn't science and technology more important than the divisive legacy of a politician?