Sunday 29 January 2017

A Bronze Day

Bronze Age Technology
Saturday 4th or Sunday 5th March 2017
Dove Valley Centre, Longnor

Bronze dagger in Buxton Museum
Upper Dove Valley (no snow for us, we hope!)

The ability to work bronze changed our world 3,000 years ago. It took an edge and held it, finer and sharper than flint that chipped or chert that cracked. Bronze offered a new blade, a different weight, a certain shining glamour. Working bronze set us on a path that led to iron and eventually, well, us!

As part of the Collections in the Landscape Project, Buxton Museum has been working with ancient technology specialist James Dilley to review Stone and Bronze Age collections. James has done various public events with the museum but now we are offering an intensive day exploring those Bronze Age technologies. Under James’ expert guidance, participants will work with moulds, a charcoal furnace, bronze and copper and bellows to make their own bronze artefact to take home
  • tools, materials and protective equipment will be provided
  • this is a 1 day workshop repeated on the Sunday 
  • participants must be 16 years of age or older
  • £50 per person includes lunch - advanced booking is essential
  • to book: call the museum on 01629 533540 during office hours
  • directions and further details sent nearer the time

Another March event:
Exploring Ancient Landscapes: a walk through time
Saturday 25th March 2017

(this event was published in the blog "Walking through time")

Have you ever wondered what the grassy lumps in the field are, why the field hedge is where it is or what that old building was used for? Archaeologist and heritage interpreter Bill Bevan will help you identify and understand the clues from our past that survive in the landscape. The Hope Valley between Castleton and Hope is an excellent place to find these remains of the past. The day will begin by looking at historic maps before walking and talking in the landscape itself on a circular walk between the two villages.

Please note, the Museum is closed for redevelopment until May 2017


Dove Valley Centre

Saturday 28 January 2017

Walking through history

Exploring Ancient Landscapes 
a walk through time
Saturday 25th March 2017
looking out at a wider world


Have you ever wondered what the grassy lumps in the field are, why the field hedge is where it is or what that old building was used for? From ancient beginnings, Castleton in the Hope Valley has grown and changed. Those changes can still be traced in the patterns of fields and footpaths, in long views of landscapesand the routes of paths and roads

Archaeologist and heritage interpreter Bill Bevan will help you identify and understand the clues from our past that survive in the landscape. The Hope Valley between Castleton and Hope is an excellent place to trace these changing fortunes of a village. The day will begin by looking at historic maps before walking and talking in the landscape itself on a circular walk between the two villages.

still changing: Castleton in 1951
“Exploring Ancient Landscapes” is one of a series of Knowledge Seeker workshops being organised as part of Buxton Museum and Art Gallery’s Collections in the Landscape (CITL) project. With a grant from the Heritage Lottery, the Museum is changing the way people can access the Collections. As well as physical changes to the Museum itself, collections are going on-line and a series of apps will encourage people to connect places with Museum treasures even when they are out walking in the Peaks

Times: 10 – 4 (please bring your own packed lunch)
Venue: YHA Losehill Hall, Castleton
This is a free event but places are limited so advanced booking is essential
Book: through eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/d/derbyshire--buxton-museum/events/?crt=regular&sort=best
Or go to eventbrite.co.uk and search “Buxton Musuem, Derbyshire”
Further details will be sent nearer the time
LAST MINUTE NEWS: AS AT 28TH JANUARY, EVENT NOT POSTED YET, SO COME BACK IN A FEW DAYS. IF ANY PROBLEMS CONTACT ME DIRECTLY: creepingtoad@btinternet.com





Thursday 26 January 2017

Trees, tales and turmoils: storytelling in schools


Summer stories

Stories in school

and other excitements

with Creeping Toad

celebrating the richness of the changing year, here are stories, sculptures, prehistoric adventures, occasional Vikings,  books and  boggarts



With stories spinning from the first signs of spring right through to earth giants, summer flowers and thunder-tigers, here are stories and activities to enchant and inspire.



Drawing on 30 years of professional experience, Gordon’s work blends environmental experience with creativity. “Much of my work uses storytelling and story making but I also make small masks, giant masks, flags, lanterns, pop-up landscapes and create wild and wonderful occasions”

Scottish tours:
This year, I will be up in northern Scotland:
8 – 19th May 2017 SOLD OUT!
4 – 15th September 2017
For other possible dates, drop me an email. For dates in England and wales, just get in touch and we'll see what we can do!  Only Irish dates at the moment are  late April and the Environmental Education Ireland gathering then





A days visit to your school might include:

storytelling performances: lasting up to 60 minutes for up to 90 children at a time



stories out of anything! outdoors or in, we'll use leaves and pine cones, twigs and stones and shells to inspire words, create poems and shape a set of stories never told before

(allow 60 minutes for a class session)

New workshop!

puppets and headfuls of animals: like the illustration, we can make quick finger puppet animals or magnificent animal crowns. Allow an hour and a half for a class

New workshop!

Heroes for stories: building characters - as quick puppets and as written pieces: capturing the qualities of our characters for stories: their ambitions, triumphs, disasters and secrets - skills for a richer tale


Stone Age Days: with stories to set the scene, we’ll look at the worlds of our ancestors with flint tools, bone needles, wooden bowls, fur and feathers.  Usually half a day for a class. Ask for more details



story and book workshops: taking a bit longer (allow 90 minutes for a class) as well as discovering those stories no-one has ever heard before, now we will build those into the books that no-one has ever read before and leave the classroom with a library no-one has ever visited before!


pop-up storyscapes: allow an hour for a class: gathering ideas, images and words well make quick 3-d landscapes holding the essence of a story in a setting, key characters and the words that set the adventure running


tales of old Scotland: a collection of stories of Highland folklore and Scottish histories, of heroes and sorrows, bravery and the magics of sea, mountain and moor. These can be steered in various directions and we might listen to stories from Viking days or medieval and Stuart stories and even add some Scottish explorers and their adventures and disasters…



your own themes and ideas: or are you exploring a particular theme that you would like to involve some stories in? In recent projects we have also made talking stone puppets, a giant eagle to hang from a classroom ceiling, prehistoric rockpools, a swarm of shadow dragons, pop-up castles



Charges: £250 a day: includes storytellers fee, travel and materials. Can be paid on the day or I can invoice you.  
Activities can be adapted to suit groups from P1 through to Secondary


For further information: visit the Creeping Toad website at



To book: contact Gordon directly at
            creepingtoad@btinternet.com

 

Wednesday 18 January 2017

Bertram, Beeston and artists

Collection of the Artists
writing starts with walking, and experiencing


When I start a project like this, it usually begins in a babble of words. It often doesn’t matter what direction I am meant to be going in, my self just fills up with any old thing. Bits, phrases, odd rhymes, sudden weathers of feelings, images to try to gather into words. It’s interesting and rewarding and exciting as it starts to give me unexpected shapes. A commission might be asking for “a story about a tree” and my sensible head goes sensibly off on a path through the woods, skipping slightly, perhaps swinging Little Red’s basket while wearing Dorothy’s shiny red shoes. But the rest of me will have sidetracked completely and be sitting under the trollbridge sharing marshmallows* with a troll family and knitting socks for sheep. And that random departure is almost always the response that gives the best results
anything can set the fires of ideas

Beeston Tor
So now I’m in the random stage. My note book is filling with conversations with ravens about the warmth of Liff’s Low. I’m watching clouds turn over the emptiness of Fin Cop. A whole tribe of Boggarts arrived in the margin of notes about caves and stalactites. And St Bertram is simply being irritating.

“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 into the landscape, CotA is probably quieter. There are 6 of us, 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.

The team include
Potter: Caroline Chouler
Richard and Amanda from Kidology, bringing visual art and music to the work
Textile artist Seiko Kineshito
And metalworker Simon Watson will be shaping ideas into bronze
O, and me: storyteller and poet
(more links will follow!)

Richard and Amanda are CITL long term artists-in-residence and are already producing work related to the collection
we have already done events on curiosities

Over the next few weeks, ideas will develop: together and as individual artists and as things evolve, I’ll post them here – at least from my work

It’s exciting stuff. I know what I think may come out of this, but who knows…

1. O, Bertram,
Christian hero,
Or abandoned Pagan saint,
I will give you
The apple in my bag,
The chocolate in my pocket,
A poem from my wordstore,
If you will bring me safe from this place.



Up here.
It goes up here.
There’s a rope to hold onto.
Try coming down backwards.
It’s easier backwards.
You do need to let go


And then there is St B
Don’t misunderstand me, I like the chap – bit of a fool, maybe. He did, after all, leave his new wife in labour in a wolf-wood to go off hoping to find a helpful midwife? He really couldn’t have helped himself? Of course not. Then we wouldn’t have had the tragedy, the despair, the renunciation of worldly things, life in a cave, death, sanctification, pilgrims, hidden bones and a shrine that is one of the very few left in an Anglican Church in England. Or so I am told…..There are other St B’s but ours lived (eventually) at Beeston Tor and then his bones were enshrined at the little church at Ilam and that is his only shrine, anywhere. Other St Bertrams are apparently not him. He does have a statue at St Bartholomew’s in Longnor just a few miles up the dale.

Find out more? St B turns up in lots of books, but you could try Sacred Britain by Martin Palmer and Nigel Palmer (Piatkus, 1997, p149)
Walk more? Why not consider following the new pilgrimage route from Ilam to Eyam?


2. Here?
Is this where your pilgrims came?
Did they hold a rope too?
Was this path easier then?
A thousand years less stone-cracking ice?

Hand over hand,
Take it slowly.
A long reach over nothing for a wary foot.
The river waits.
Don’t think,
Just reach.
It’s easier backwards.
You do need to let go




It all gets a bit confusing and he’s not really within my remit for CotA but this comes back to that random excitement. So, as ideas develop, so will something inspired by St Bertram and a wonderfully craggy cliff where people lived, worshipped, died and hid their treasures for thousands of years….

3. Pause here,
A tormentil lawn in morning warmth,
Warm enough to wake the ants who live in the stone,
Rest and be still and listen,
To the whispers
On the wind, in the stone, out of the shadows

He don’t heal.
He don’t cure.
He blesses babies.
Babbies is important since ‘e loss ‘is.
‘E telt me not to be so addlepated, such a fool ‘e call’d me.


Ah.
There!
Down there,
Not up here.
Down there,
A stroll down the lane,
An easy wade through cold water,
A splashing ford,
That side of the hill, not
This side of the tor,
Hand over hand,
It’s easier backwards.

O, Bertram,
I gave
The apple in my bag to the birds,
The chocolate in my pocket to my friends,
And a poem from my wordstore,
I whisper to the voices in the darkness of the caves
 
we should have crossed the river

(we still haven’t got to Bertram’s cave)
(* marshmallows? O, that is another story and watch for the book due out sometime this year for that one) 
Thanks to Sarah and Ronson for being photographed....the slightly agitated lines in the poem, however, are all mine!



Sunday 15 January 2017

One bright, beady eye

Between Goldsitch and Eynhallow

Goldsitch Moss

I am not heathen but I respect and honour those wild northern gods and sometimes they feel very close…
  
One bright beady eye
 
Goldsitch Moss
Goldsitch Moss
Trembles with life,
A vibrant, simmering
Shimmer of sphagnum green.
Willow holds the edge
Of the frog-calling bog,
And birch climbs the crags,
Trailing a leaf-fall of
Delicate blades,                                 
While bilberry coyly flirts,
In purple,
Seducing visitors,
Into impromptu, lip-stained feasts.
Heather’s leaves and scented flowers
Belie the twisted determination,
Of rope-roots
Knotting rock to peat,
Tying the world together,

While Odin sits
On a grit-stone throne,
Watching the world go by
Through one bright, black, beady eye.
 
Midhowe Broch
Barely the beat of a raven’s wing,
To carry his will
From Memory to Thought,
From the Moss to the Sea.

Wet skins,
Take a breath,
Barely the draw of a longship’s oars
From Midhowe to Gurness,
The sail flaps,
Billows into blowing cheeks,
Straining,
Slowly,
Reluctantly,
The prow yields to the wind,
Lifting,
Storm-runner
Surge-cutter,
Foam-rider,
Wave-breaker.

The Sound swells, races
Lifts the longship, runs,
Drops, suddenly, into
The turquoise calm
Of a seal-wife bay
Behind the Holy Island.
 
Eynhallow Sound beyond the Broch of Gurness
Odin broods,
On his gritstone throne,
Watching the world,
Through one bright, black eye,
Pecking holes
In my heart.
But Freyr
Picks a path into my soul
And I am filled
By the hope of
A God made of wind and oak-leaves
And the Boar who bristles
In the thicket.

Orkney - raven - Huginn? Muninn?


Goldsitch Moss is a Staffordshire Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve near my home in Buxton
Eynhallow, and  Midhowe and Gurness Brochs (I haven't linked the brochs - start at Eynhallow and make the journey yourself) are in Orkney
Goldsitch Moss

Friday 13 January 2017

Snow-silence


Snow-day

I’ve been quiet for a few weeks on this blog as work, life and the festive season caught up with me. New entries are brewing, however, and will follow shortly

But this week winter has really hit here in the hills and after an eventful drive home last night, I have had a day of meetings at home while stepping out into a bright winter day with the hills white, roads closed and that sense of precious, dramatic stillness that comes with snow. It will probably not last – the roads are clear again, and footpaths are thawing – but for this day it has been glorious

And reminds me of a poem I wrote a few years ago now and the sense of impending witner and the stillness it can bring

ANTICIPATION ii

Autumn waits,
Falling into gold, and yellow, and russet,
As mist gathers,
Wool unravelled through the trees.
In the hollow dales,
The lake anticipates winter,
And the rune-cracked ice.
But for now,
Its dark, cold reflective depth
Is divination enough

October 2007


Poem is in the book  Old stones and ancient bones