Monday at the museum, mostly
Jun. 19th, 2024 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe weather, as forecast, is mixed: patches of beautiful sunshine, and sudden showers. Monday morning did not look promising, so we started with a visit to the Museum, which is in run by English Heritage as an introduction to the Priory, and has been much revamped since our last visit, three years ago. It is distinctly a museum of two halves - three, if you count the gift shop, and you probably should. You enter through the historical section: information boards about Northumbria's golden age, the kings and the saints and the coming of the Vikings.. a fine collection of carved stones, and one tiny piece of blue glass, the size of a child's thimble. When you have passed through this gallery, you find yourself in a darkened space hung with representations of Holy Island, dominated by a multimedia piece by Olivia Lomenech-Gill, whose images of wild creatures form a sort of nature trail through the museum. It's a map of the island, mashed up with drawings and collaged treasures and scraps of text from Katrina Porteous's poem The Refuge Box (extract here) which plays on a loop in the gallery. Did I like the image? I couldn't really see it as a whole. But I enjoyed getting right up close to the glass and looking at all the little details:
Between the two halves of the museum is a sort of inflection point, a doorway and to one side of it a display case, which so charmed me that I am going to do the unprecedented and post a selfie:
Not an egg, but a beautifully lit pebble. The accompanying text reads:
Tell me that the pebble was found somewhere it would not occur naturally, and I won't argue: but this doesn't tell me that. Neither where the pebble came from, nor where it was found (was it at a burial site, for example?). How old it is, yes, they can tell me that (whatever that date refers to - not the actual date of the actual pebble, surely?) and what people believed... On the one hand, there is something so medidative about the pebble itself: I can easily believe that someone would have picked it up and carried it with them. And on the other hand, my own meditation so quickly fills with this sort of disputation.
After the museum, a quick visit to the Priory, cut short by the rain. We took refuge in the church, and then made a dash to the Post Office and bought supplies for lunch. In the afternoon the sunshine lured me out, solo this time, and I wandered down to the harbour, where the rain caught me again, and I sat it out in the shelter of the Window on Wild Lindisfarne, watching the swallows swooping past - and under, for the one brave swallow who had nested there. By the time I got home, the sun was hot.
Between the two halves of the museum is a sort of inflection point, a doorway and to one side of it a display case, which so charmed me that I am going to do the unprecedented and post a selfie:
Not an egg, but a beautifully lit pebble. The accompanying text reads:
3. White quartz pebble, 7th - 9th centuries.
Pilgrims and travellers may have carried white quartz pebbles, gathered from the shore of a holy place, as protective charms. The pebbles may have been placed at burial sites. These were portable versions of the larger white stones used for the ritual of ceremonially turning 'globes of white marble' on the base of a high cross, dedicated to a saint. People believed that Judgement Day would arrive once the large stone was warn through.
Tell me that the pebble was found somewhere it would not occur naturally, and I won't argue: but this doesn't tell me that. Neither where the pebble came from, nor where it was found (was it at a burial site, for example?). How old it is, yes, they can tell me that (whatever that date refers to - not the actual date of the actual pebble, surely?) and what people believed... On the one hand, there is something so medidative about the pebble itself: I can easily believe that someone would have picked it up and carried it with them. And on the other hand, my own meditation so quickly fills with this sort of disputation.
After the museum, a quick visit to the Priory, cut short by the rain. We took refuge in the church, and then made a dash to the Post Office and bought supplies for lunch. In the afternoon the sunshine lured me out, solo this time, and I wandered down to the harbour, where the rain caught me again, and I sat it out in the shelter of the Window on Wild Lindisfarne, watching the swallows swooping past - and under, for the one brave swallow who had nested there. By the time I got home, the sun was hot.
