I have been cogitating on the matter of a Bluestone Museum for some little while, and at last it has come to pass. Poly bags have been extracted from cupboards and cardboard boxes have been opened, and rock and sediment samples have at last been brought out into the light. Nothing groundbreaking -- just good old-fashioned spotted dolerite, foliated rhyolite, Irish Sea till, erratic pebbles and other things related to bluestone entrainment, transport and dumping.
So if you want a balanced assessment of the myths and disputes surrounding the bluestones, this has to be your destination of first choice --and you will get a much more nuanced set of explanations than you ever will at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre or at the National Museum. This is all about science, not mythology......
The new exhibition is at the Pembrokeshire Candle Centre in Cilgwyn, at SA42 0QN. My wife used this room as a mini-museum of candle making for many years, and at last she has retired and sold off most of her stock -- and nature abhors a vacuum.
So a warm welcome to anybody who feels like calling in. Admission is free, and we are open as long as we are here and awake.
I have tried to make the little museum as "hands on" as possible, with nothing hidden behind glass. On the walls the photos, captions and commentary are grouped together into a sequence of displays, clockwise around the room. The main categories of info are as follows:
An exploration of a classic scientific dispute
Stonehenge and the Bluestones -- the facts and the fantasies
The science of the stones
The villains of the piece
The quarrying myth
The myth of the "lost stone circle"
Stonehenge
The work of ice
The Ice Age
Occam's Razor
20 comments:
Great idea Brian! I look forward to visiting when the powers that be open Britain up to exiles and tourists again.
Hear, hear! Must come over next time I'm staying with brother Peter near Trevine.
People who aren't sure how to get to the Museum should look on their Ordnance Survey map where they will see the Candle Centre prominently marked.
Thanks Tony. The location is indeed still marked, although after 45 years of candle making my wife is at last retiring. Post code SA42 0QN. On some Google Maps the location comes up as "Greencroft Books" as well..........
Had some really interesting visits yesterday, from people who brought more useful information than I was able to give to them! That was a nice bonus......
Great!
You should extend an invite to MPP and the digging team seeing that they are in the area. It will certainly be an education to them.
Sadly, not everybody wants to be educated..........
Sometimes once in a generation a gathering of educated elites comes along in whatever field of study and those gathered together just make what Les Dawson would call a reyt cock - up and still sound reyt chuffed.
The leadership team of the Stones of Stonehenge project consists of Mike Parker Pearson (project manager and executive officer), Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Kate Welham and Adam Stanford. Then there are around a dozen other like Clive Ruggles, Ros Cleal, Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer, who are pulled in for their expertise in various fields. Some of those appear as co-authors in assorted publications. So the team is up to around 20 people, who share corporate responsibility for everything that appears in papers published under joint names. So they are all in this up to their necks, and so, when the whole thing comes crashing down, as it surely will, the responsibility and the pain will be spread rather widely, in spite of the fact that everybody knows the increasingly bizarre bluestone narrative is driven with single-minded ferocity by just one man.......
I reckon Ros Cleal is far too intelligent, wise and sensible to go along wholeheartedly with most of Pearson's crazed utterings. I used to work as a volunteer over at the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury.
I am told she has been pulled in because she is a Neolithic pottery specialist. They obviously expect, at some stage, to find some fragments of ancient pottery which can be matched with a few old bits and pieces from Stonehenge......
MPP's crazed utterings? Well, yes and no. They look pretty crazy to most normal human beings, but of course therein lies their appeal -- and in the strange world occupied by archaeologists, status and reputation seem nowadays to be based not on reliability, scientific skill and interpretive ability, but on how exciting and appealing your narrative is. In the post-processual world, the crazier your ideas are the more media coverage you get, and the truth (which is often difficult to establish) becomes immaterial.
Pearson is, to quote from "Beyond Our Ken" (precursor to " Round the Horne") outwardly just an "ageing hippy", not crazed but avuncular. Should have his own Talk Show....
Well, that was interesting -- I think I had a spy into the Museum today. He slipped in while I was talking to another couple about this and that, and then slipped away again without uttering a word. Strange. Never mind -- spies are welcome, as long as they don't blow the place up........
Brian, you are an old hand at creating interpretation centres, as you had a Centre in Newport earlier, didn't you.....
Yes, I was involved with Eco Centre Wales (under several different names) for 35 years, and we did have a public exhibition room, as well as mounting assorted mobile displays that went round to agricultural shows and other venues. "Outreach" I suppose we would call it nowadays. I also helped with the setting up of the Norwegian Glacier Museum in Fjaerland -- that was great fun, involving the invention of assorted "hands-on" displays, some of which worked rather well, demonstrating the internal workings of glaciers. I realised long ago that exhibitions cannot afford to be "flat" -- so you need depth and a 3D effect. Even better, you need things that people can handle -- hence all those lumps of rock dug out of my storage cupboard.......
"....demonstrating the internal workings of glaciers". How wonderful that would be as a way of educating the younger generation of would - be Stonehenge archaeologists ( rather than the present stubborn generation of ostrich - like supposedly "senior" experts.....
Our it on again at, say, the Aberystwyth University Geology/ Geography Department......and/or Swansea.
THAT would surely out the cat amongst the Parker Pearson persuaded pigeons.....
"Our" should be "PUT"
Brian, people need to realise that Parker Pearson's Pied Piper - esque poseurs cannot hold a CANDLE to your glacial geomorphological expertise....
A travelling Bluestone controversy" exhibition! Now that would be something........... of course I take a position, but at least my exhibition is based on the fact that there is a controversy. So I explore both positions and try to demonstrate (very briefly indeed) what the arguments and the facts are. That degree of balance is entirely missing from the "Stones of Stonehenge" team, who still cannot bring themselves to admit that there is anybody out there who disagrees with them on anything. "Never admit for a moment that there is any weakness in your position, or that anybody thinks differently...." seems to be the mantra. People who think like that should have no place in a university department and no exposure via the specialist literature.
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