Cyfarthfa Castle Museum

Raven (who used to be Cylene, keep up) now lives considerably up the Rhondda Valley and so I don't see them very often. Yet it's surprisingly doable as a day trip provided the roads are favourable. Yesterday the weather was against us and Raven had an appointment in the middle of the day so although they would like to go to St Fagans one day we in fact stayed local and went to Cyfarthfa Castle, which functions as the municipal museum for Merthyr Tydfil. Even covered with scaffolding (and looking a bit rough in places) few local museum services have settings as grandiose as Cyfarthfa, complete with a park and lake. The Castle was built as the home of the Crawshay family who built their fortune on ironworking, and once they vacated it, oddly, the Council opened part of the ground floor as a museum and the rest as a school. You have to piece this history together from the displays rather than being oriented as you go in, but as we went round them in the wrong direction the task was made especially taxing! The collection is remarkably eclectic as the museum attracted art and artefacts from a variety of well-to-do gentlemen and only later began an effort to represent the social and working history of Merthyr. You are rightly not allowed to overlook the fact that the fantastic wealth of the Crawshays derived from the unspeakable toil of generations of local residents and often involved their injury and harm, exactly as you would expect from Red South Wales, as once was. Maybe that political identity only survives in its museums now. 

Smaller Than You Thought

In fact all the Easter services went rather well apart from a confusion about hymn numbers on Sunday ('I feel like a bingo caller', said Il Rettore as he tried to read out the correct one), but having also had to pop to the hospital to take communion to a congregation member on Easter afternoon as all the chaplains were off sick I was very glad to observe 'Bank Holiday Order' on Monday and only do the work I absolutely had to. This was complete early enough in the day to allow me to take advantage of the weather and zoom to Uffington. Algorithms had thoughtfully brought to my attention a new display at the museum there and as I'd never seen either Wayland's Smithy or the White Horse of Uffington I decided to go. 

Apart from the distance I ended up walking (further than anticipated) things being on the small side was the theme of the day. The Neolithic long barrow of Wayland's Smithy has two massive sarsens guarding its entrance but the proof that it was made by fairies is that only the Wee Folk could have fitted inside the burial chamber. I'd thought it was like the West Kennet Long Barrow which has space for visitors to wander around inside but no, it's only tall enough for an adult to crouch in. At the foot of a tree I found what were clearly 'cremated remains', reinforcing how important the place is for some people.

The Horse, too, I had imagined ranging over perhaps a hundred yards of a broad hillside, and P Newman in Lost Gods of Albion says that's how long it is, but I wouldn't have put it much bigger than 50 feet! Curiously that made the figure all the more moving to me - to think firstly that our remote ancestors made this effigy that they wouldn't even have been able to see properly, and also that it has survived three thousand years or more, just a fragile, delicate thing, an absence more than a presence, turf removed to reveal the chalk beneath. 

I did know that Uffington Museum was going to be tiny. It started out as a 17th-century schoolroom, and Bank Holidays are one of the few times it's open. There is basically one room, with a mezzanine forming a separate display area; that 'exhibition' that tempted me there was a small display about mythological landscapes, and I was very pleased with it. Very good graphics and information, a video with an Anglo-Saxon poem being recited against a background of spooky trees, and items left by visitors at Wayland's Smithy, from dreamcatchers to decorated stones. Easily the eeriest is a white-painted plaster ram's head deposited in the chamber itself. Most odd. I'm glad I wasn't the one who found it. 

I Heart Badbury

Although I have said I wouldn't post here unless there was something definite to post about, and the days since I got back from leave haven't provided a great deal Churchy to comment on - I see no reason to add to the pile of speculation about how Sarah Mullaly will turn out as ABC - I find I have an itch to write a little. At some point I might retread my steps and report on visits to underground Margate or art exhibitions in London, but they are things anyone can find out about easily. Instead today, as I and Mum drove out to eat our fish and chips at Badbury Rings, I spotted a red heart painted on one of the gnarled old beeches of the 190-year-old avenue lining the B3082 between Wimborne and Blandford. So once our lunch was over and Mum relaxed into a doze I went for a walk not over the Rings as usual but to find the Heart. Here it is: it seems a fairly fresh addition, carefully painted into what I suspect is an old mark on the tree. The great Badbury trees are reaching the end of their lives, and already the National Trust has replaced many with hornbeams; a new line is growing behind them to renew their work when they finally die, but the landscape will look very different when they're finally gone.

Haslemere Revisited

Haslemere is only a bearable train journey away so on my day off I went there today. It's an odd arrangement: the station lies in a no-man's-land in between the old town clustering around the crossroads leading to Guildford, Midhurst and Liphook, and at the other end a new bit where the supermarkets are. These are very distinct, witnessed by the differences between the artisanal ciabattas and loose-leaf teas served by the café in the old bit and the basic sandwich and mug of best builder's I got in the one in the new. 

The Museum is in the old town. Again, it's an unusual place, set up in the 1880s by Sir Joseph Hutchinson who used his collection of natural history to create a little version of the national Natural History Museum on the grounds that, pre-railway, most denizens of Haslemere would never make it to South Kensington and they really needed to know about whale sharks and lemurs. Over the years, for complex reasons, the Museum has acquired an Egyptology collection (including a mummy) and a range of European folk art: I don't think I've heard the word 'treen' used in earnest since I left Wycombe Museum in 2003. 

I've seen Haslemere Educational Museum (its title) once before, in 2012, but I discovered that I only really remembered it through the photographs I took at the time. I recognised some of the artefacts, but I'd made startlingly unfamiliar images of them, and it was rather pleasing to find that most of the displays came as a surprise. 

I began working in museums because I was inspired by the idea that they could do social good, interpreting a community to itself. I had before my imagination the example of Elspeth King at the People's Palace in Glasgow, a kind of history-from-the-bottom-up heroic socialist-realist model of the museum world. 35 years later I think about them differently - I see their treasuries of objects and stories as revealing, not a master narrative, but the interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory complexity of human lives, and that that's really the point. Some of those lives, in fact, aren't even human. We are brought together with experiences which are not our own, and made to reflect on them. Isn't that amazing?

Farewell RRM

The River & Rowing Museum at Henley opened the year after I arrived at Wycombe Museum. We were local authority, they were independent, but broadly speaking still within the 'social history' sector, and immediately we sort of looked to them as one of the more prestigious, grander vessels within the great fleet of British museums. The year after opening, its building won a major architectural award and it was declared National Heritage Museum of the Year. Yet despite attending a couple of events there I'd never actually done the basic thing of looking round the galleries. This holiday week I decided to remedy that - and discovered that my resolution was just as well, as in February the RRM announced its intention to close. It's been losing about £1M per annum for years and has reached the end of the road, or the river if you prefer. 

A visit reveals why, really. The place is enormous: the galleries alone are vast, and attached to them is an array of ancillary rooms for school groups and meetings which have never been fully used. It's gorgeously and imaginatively designed and considering the mainstay of the place is a sport I have minimal interest in, even I could just about see the point. Also, the extreme heterogeneity of the displays might be considered an advantage: as well as all the actual rowing stuff, there's a 'Wind in the Willows Experience' which recreates the illustrations in the book in 3-D form, an array of artworks from John Piper's time at Fawley Bottom round the corner, a gallery of contemporary riverine art, and local history material about Henley itself. But although the Museum seemed quite busy to me on Thursday, parts of it I wandered around without meeting another soul, a bit like the minerals rooms at the Natural History Museum. Nobody seemed that interested in the great John Piper, while the huge Henley Gallery, isolated from the rest of the displays by the long, narrow corridor that was the art gallery, I had entirely to myself. There's a whole room devoted to one painting - I can see why, as it's a photo-realistic image showing Henley town by a 17th-century Dutch artist full of architectural, social, and environmental information, but even so, it's a whole room devoted to one painting. Ironically, if anything survives of the RRM it's likely to be just that collection of artefacts, forming the basis for a new Museum of Henley. But what about the rest of it? Museums think of themselves as permanent, but of course they are as much a part of the flow of history as the communities or subjects they curate on behalf of the rest of us. 

V&A East Storehouse

Alerted by a friend, I found my way yesterday to the new V&A Museum Storehouse halfway between Hackney Wick and Stratford, a slightly otherworldly area of rebuilding, new estates, and gigantic square structures of which the Storehouse is one. The marketing is that this is a new, radical approach to museum display, a warehouse of open storage through which visitors can wander at will, forming their own connections and stories as they look up details of the artefacts they're interested in via QR codes. This is not quite the case. Much of the cavernous space, which really resembles a cross between a cash-and-carry store and the entrance atrium of some vast company office, is out of bounds, and I rather would have liked to inspect, for instance, the five-foot-high plastic anime pandas I could glimpse through the shelves and gantries, but couldn't. There is a rational storage scheme, but operating at the level of 'chair' or 'cabinet' it's less than helpful. 

But it's an interesting experience even if it doesn't do quite what it promises. As well as the artefacts there are some charismatic set-piece displays, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office from 1937 (an oppressively soporific space you can't imagine anyone doing a stroke of work in) and the Moorish Torrijos Ceiling, or the frontage from a Robin Hood Gardens flat demolished in the 2000s (we like a bit of Brutalism, we do). Here and there you can peer down a corridor and glimpse a conservator at work. Quite the most startling experience lies around a corner I wouldn't have found without some staff pointing visitors in its direction - a gigantic darkened space with nothing in it but a seat, and a colossal stage cloth copy of a Picasso painting. And I found alabaster panels of the Imprisonment & Martyrdom of St Catherine (very poor photo).

Entry is free, and I wanted to go before the David Bowie archive arrives in September and the whole thing becomes impossible. However, part of the cost may be recouped through the café, where I gibbed at paying £8 for a very small bun made with what looked like burned bread but which is probably artisanal. I had better stop before I start sounding like a member of Reform UK and stress that I went round the corner to a café called Badu run by a Mr Badu and staffed by a polite young woman in a hijab where I had a spicy veg pattie and side salad with a cup of tea and it was very pleasing indeed thank you very much.

Spring Adventures

It feels as though I've been waiting a long while for this week off that is just coming to an end: the lateness of Easter has removed it far from my last break. I spent a couple of days in Dorset, taking my Mum to West Bay and my sister to Knowlton Rings; zoomed to South Wales to see my friend Rain who has been going through all sorts of trouble, taking them to an antiques emporium (their choice) and Llandaff Cathedral (mine); London yesterday to see two more friends, one for lunch in the amazing surroundings of Mercato Mayfair which used to be the church of St Mark North Audley Street, and the other at Pret London Bridge (probably less worthy of a photo), and two exhibitions, Tim Burton at the Design Museum and Secrets of the Thames at the Museum of Docklands; and a final excursion today to Leigh-on-Sea. Funny place, with one old street along the shoreline full of fishing-themed pubs and a more modern one at the hilltop where the shops are. I spent a good amount of my time in Leigh trying to find somewhere that would serve me a sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch rather than fish-and-chips or tapas; I should just have gone to the church where they were offering community lunches!

I was also delighted to be shown a new and unheralded image of St Catherine at the Docklands exhibition - on a gold ring plucked from the Thames. Here she is, just visible, holding a tiny, tiny wheel, the last of a trio with St John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin.

Beautiful Badbury

When this blog passed its 2000th post I said I wasn't going to be striving to find something to say every other day, as I had in the past, but only post when there was something positive happening. Nothing very much has gone on today apart from a trip to Dorset to see my mum, going out with her for a meal, and visiting the farm shop at Pamphill Dairy, finishing with my obligatory walk around Badbury Rings. But Badbury Rings is always restful and calming, and maybe you find my photos the same! Today I did the opposite of my usual route of going straight through the monument and then following the southern ramparts back, by turning north along the banks and then cutting back through the wooded centre. I couldn't remember ever seeing the Trig. pillar before, somehow.

Oxford Springtime

I couldn't have picked a better day to visit Oxford than yesterday. The pellucid blue skies framed the golden-coloured buildings, reminding me of our trip to Florence many years ago (I'm not a very good traveller so it remains a rare foray beyond these shores). Here's a view of one of the Clarendon Building muses (which have an interesting history), seen beyond the Bridge of Sighs along New College Lane.

Although I did get to see some friends, the centrepiece of my day was a visit to the Holy Well of Holywell Manor. The Manor is the graduate block of Balliol College, and although I studied at Balliol it was only as an undergraduate so I never went there, and had only glimpsed the Well through a window in the gate of the Praefectus's garden. Yesterday I was allowed in to examine the site itself - though apparently my request had prompted the Manor's health-and-safety manager to examine the well and decide that it isn't as safe as it could be and needs to be added to Balliol's lengthening list of works! There is a horribly corroded-looking set of steps leading down to into the well-chamber and as Mr H&S had been down there to look that morning I was perfectly happy to rely on his photos. I am still picking through the tangled history of the Well so won't go through it here, but the chamber still seems to contain the stone tub identified by the Clewer Sisters who occupied the Manor in the late 1800s as an Anglo-Saxon font, rather dubiously I fear. The Praefectus's PA gave me a copy of the history of the Manor by Oswyn Murray, who I overlapped with at Balliol all those years ago but who I didn't have anything directly to do with. It has some useful details of ghosts and folklore!

The 'Oracles, Omens and Answers' show at the Bodleian is fun (the central African custom of divination using land spiders was news to me) and I went into St Mary Mag's, rather scandalously for the first time ever considering I lived yards away from it for three years. There is a dramatic statue of St Catherine on the high altar reredos.

St Catherine at the Trust

I met up with Professor Cotillion at the National Trust's Greys Court. The place was thronged with visitors, such that the car park was one in, one out. Eventually we got in, but took so long over lunch and attending to the needs of the Professor's lovely King Charles spaniels that the house was shut with only half an hour to go before all the patrons were expelled. Well, I'd paid for my ticket, so I snuck in the back door while nobody was looking and made my way around the (not all that inspiring) house in the wrong direction. On the stairs was an unexpected reward for my duplicity, a stained glass image of St Catherine. It looks 17th or 18th-century to me, but more than that I couldn't venture: German, to judge by the black-letter Gothic text? Big sword, I'll hazard that.

New Year Follies - Ingress Abbey, Greenhithe

This year I will carry on the approach of only posting here when there is something definitely worth posting about rather than as a discipline every other day, but although this isn't a church-related subject I nevertheless think it's a useful topic. It was only by accident that I very recently became aware of the follies of Ingress Abbey at Greenhithe in Kent, when someone on the Holy Wells LiberFaciorum page posted a picture of the Monk's Well. This was already mentioned in Ross Parish's book on Kentish wells, but I'd paid no attention to it and certainly not twigged that it formed part of a larger landscape of follies and garden design. So today I took the North Kent line out of London Bridge station and then the short walk to the park.

Ingress Abbey is an old estate going back to the 14th century, the current Tudor-Gothic house dating to 1833; between 1922 and the 19970s it was a nautical training college, but then fell into ruin. When the folly writers Headley & Meulenkamp came to the site, they found the park overgrown and the follies all but invisible, and worried about the whole place falling victim to redevelopment. This it did, but Crest Nicholson, who bought Ingress in 1998, restored the mansion and cleared out the grounds as well as building a sprawling new estate which strikes me as a sort of cut-price version of Poundbury in Dorset with its emphasis on the picturesque and individual. The current residents of the Abbey itself are British-Canadian oil and gas tycoon Sam Malin and his Cameroonian model and singer wife Irene Major: Mr Malin happens to be an Honorary Consul for Lithuania which is why the country's arms appear on the Abbey gates.

Following the Fastway road from the railway station, the first folly I came across was the Grotto, a set of shallow flint niches to the right of what was once the Abbey drive:

But this is just a very modest taster. Round the corner to the left in a close of modern dwellings, and down a flight of steps, is the very weird Cave of the Seven Heads. There are now only six of the eponymous Heads left, but very baleful they are indeed. The Cave itself has niches set into the flint interior. 

We then follow the road round to the east, and take a flight of steps, which brings us to the gate of the Abbey and the way into the Park. Here we find the glorious ruined arch known as the Grange and its associated tunnel and ancillary chambers; the Monk's Well, which does actually have a well in it; and a decorated flint seat, the Lover's Arch, looking out over the lawn of the Park. 

There are other structures around the Park which may have a more utilitarian origin - the blocked-up Georgian Tunnel, and what it variously called the Model Farm or the Limekiln:

Finally, to the east of the Park, in the middle of Palladian Circus, is a grass-covered mound topped by a flint needle capped with steel: you follow a spiral path to the top. This modern folly courtesy of the estate developers supposedly commemorates a Hermit's Cave which some say occupied the site (the mound was once taken to be Tudor, but it is not). 

Along what remains of Greenhithe High Street is what seems to be a former chapel flanked by single-bay cottages, all in Gothic style and faced in flints. It might have nothing at all to do with the Abbey estate, but it seems worth mentioning too. 

This is a very incongruous set of structures to find surrounded by modern housing on the south side of the Thames Estuary. The redevelopment of the estate makes it hard to envisage how all the follies related to one another, especially the Cave of the Seven Heads which is separated from the others by a busy road and faces west rather than inwards towards the rest of the composition: perhaps it dates to a different phase. The Heads have a distinctly Mannerist flavour to them and I wonder whether they were imported from elsewhere, rather than made especially for the purpose. The truth is that we don't know who was responsible for the follies: Historic England and most sources simply assume they date to 1833 and the rebuilding of the house, but Headley & Meulenkamp hedge their bets and I suspect they are right to do so. The structures look older to me. 

Is Ingress a Gothic Garden? I was reluctant to award this status to Deepdene, the last designed landscape which I thought might qualify for the title. I'm more inclined to look favourably on Ingress. There seems to be a genuine response here to the melancholy potential of topography which binds the follies together, rather than scattering them at random around a site. The Park originates in a quarry whose use goes back to Roman times, and the towering chalk cliffs still loom picturesquely through the trees, so whoever was responsible looked at the landscape they had inherited and saw the capacity for developing it in a Gothic direction. The Grange forms an entrance to the wild area to the rear of the house (I suspect the tidy lawn is a bit more tame than it once was), while the broad green to the front forms a contrast. 

Now, one folly I am kicking myself for missing is the Prioress's Tomb which apparently lies near the Grange. The story goes that this is the burial place of the heart of Jane Fane, last Abbess of Dartford who owned Ingress when Dartford Priory was dissolved in 1539, and that she cursed bad King Henry and all the subsequent owners of Ingress to come to ruin. This is quite something to decide to call attention to when you are building follies on your estate. One local resident even photographed a supposed White Lady weeping at the Lovers Arch seat: could she be Dame Jane herself? If Ingress was not designed as a Gothic Garden, I think it probably is now.                                                         

An Underground Mystery for St Catherine's Day

Behind the patchouli-scented shop of crystals and esoteric books that looks as though it should be in Glastonbury, an unassuming doorway opens off a yard. Yesterday a small group of intrepid souls followed a lady with a torch down a steep staircase behind this door, into a strange bell-shaped chamber decorated with images roughly scored into the chalk the cave is made from. One of the figures is a crowned woman who holds a wheel - blessed Catherine the Great-Martyr, in whose honour the place has been opened. 'This is who we're all here to see', says the guide. For this is Royston Cave, and the time is about 1pm on St Catherine's Day.

The cave is decidedly eerie. There's no mistaking the Christian nature of the crucifixion scenes - three of them - and the saints, not only Catherine, but Christopher and Lawrence waving his gridiron aloft. But the rest of it, a chaos of figures, insignia, and ambiguous marks, lurches out of the dark into the torchlight and back again, keeping its secrets. That figure might be St George, or it might just be a man with a sword. The man and woman who seem to be wearing crowns were identified by William Stukeley, who saw the cave when it was first discovered in 1742, as Richard I and Queen Berengaria on the grounds that the 'queen''s crown seems to be hovering above her head (Berengaria was never crowned); not one of Stukeley's better guesses, it seems to me. There is an excited pony and what seems to be a sheela-na-gig; there are rows of rough figures that look like versions of the Lewis Chessmen made by a less accomplished hand; there are hands bearing hearts. 

Nobody, whatever they might tell you, knows why this place exists or what it means. One volunteer has written an entire erudite book arguing that it was a secret Knights Templar chapel created after the order was suppressed in 1307: but even if the virtually-vertical entrance shaft was outside the town centre when the cave was made, any surviving loyal Templars would have been pushing their luck coming in and out of such a bizarre and inaccessible site, let alone making it in the first place. Such an argument puts aside the simple fact, too, that there's not one single unequivocal bit of Templar imagery in the whole place. The saints presumably date it to the late Middle Ages, but that's the best we can do. 

When one of the visitors began describing how the Templars were founded to look after the secrets of Atlantis I decided it was time to go! I emerged blinking into the sun and reflected that the long journey was far from a waste.

Dover - a Long View

The last holiday post this time comes from a trip to Dover with Lady Wildwood, MaisyMaid, Ms DarkSeville and Madam GreenWitch. The town did not delay us long and instead we spent the entire day in the castle. I'd been there 35 years ago or more but had forgotten the sheer size of the place - the keep, or Great Tower as they call it there, is a match for several of the castles I visited in Wales on its own. I wasn't sold on the gaudy pseudo-medieval decor in the castle, but conceded that without them it would be a succession of big bare rooms. The thing that struck us all was how close France seemed to be: on this beautifully clear day the Port of Calais and the features of the cliffs were easy to see. I would have guessed they were ten miles away at best, rather than the twenty-odd they are. On the tour of the World War Two command centre tunnels we'd seen a blown-up photo of Goering and a row of Nazi colleagues gazing across the Channel in 1941, and it was easy enough to imagine them regarding us from the other side right now. A kestrel hovered over the ramparts to welcome us, while back at Waterloo waiting for my train I watched a pigeon savage a couple of chips, chopping them into bits and improbably gobbling the lot before trotting off with what can only be described as self-satisfaction.

Back to the Caves

My last visit to Chislehurst Caves in 2008 was under the auspices of London Gothic. Yesterday's wasn't, though it included a lot of the same people and, as we all agreed, was pretty much the same as the earlier one except that we were all fifteen years older. 

There's a lot of history in Chislehurst Caves, though perhaps not quite as much as the attraction itself claims. It was WJ Nichols of the British Archaeological Association who came up with the theory that the Caves had been excavated by Druids, extended under the Roman occupation of Britain, and then further exploited by the local Anglo-Saxons. None of these ideas is actually impossible, but equally they aren't very likely, and certainly haven't been proven: there's no actual archaeological material that might solve the question one way or the other. I can't find anything online about William Nichols apart from his theories on the Caves, but he published them in the BAA journal in 1903, a time when, says the Wikipedia article on the organisation, it was 'at a low ebb'. It certainly wasn't an academic association, more a collection of amateurs who liked dibbing about in the mud and telling one another what they'd found as a prelude to a good dinner in a provincial town; already, by the early 1900s, it was something of a relic of the age when it was founded, long before archaeology was anything like a learned discipline. Our guide yesterday evening referred to him as 'Dr' Nichols, but I wonder whether he wasn't a Dr in the same way Dr Johnson was.

What we know is that the Caves appear in the historical record in a 9th-century charter; that they've had incarnations as chalk and flint mines, a WWI ammunition store, mushroom production centre, film location and music venue, and, most notably, refuge - especially for the 15,000 southeast London residents who sheltered here during the Blitz, creating a self-managed underground town complete with its own chapel blessed by the Bishop of Rochester (and which remains a consecrated space). That a variety of desperate souls and ne'er-do-wells might also have found their way here over the centuries is also not essentially impossible, providing some justification for the various tall tales the guides like to tell and visitors like to hear. 

Many of those tales are, not unnaturally, ghost stories. The Caves have been open as a tourist attraction since the 1950s, and such places develop an institutional culture in which people tell stories to process their relationship with them (I know, I've worked in them). This performs two functions. First, it develops the sense of ownership and commitment among the people who work there, cementing their status of 'guardianship' as they welcome visitors to come and look round. Second - especially where the site history may well have involved suffering and sorrow - the ghosts encode those experiences and provide us with a way of negotiating with them, of working out what we feel. Our guide yesterday told us that many years ago he used to hear the voice of a small girl laughing when he was in the tunnels alone, and, after an older colleague told him about a child who had died while playing in a far-flung part of the Caves during the War, concluded it was her: 'I got into the habit of saying hello to her when I started work in the morning', he said, 'and eventually I didn't hear her anymore'.

I wish I'd asked the context for the proud statements on the original entrance signs, visible in photos around the building, informing visitors their ticket prices went to support 'The Sanitary Fund'. I also wish my photos had come out better: this was the only half-decent one, and even it's pretty rubbish. Not a single ghost on any of them (I think). 

Cambridgeshire, July 2023

Archangel Janet and Mal moved from Glastonbury to March a few months ago, and so this holiday I decided to pop up and see them. I stopped along the way in Huntingdon, where the parish church was just setting up for its drop-in café when I arrived, too tempting a chance to turn down. Huntingdon was clearly very smart at one time, though I don't think has that much to show for it in the 21st century.

Everyone told me there was nothing to see in March, though it has a grand church and market place, and a river with canal boats, and I thought it was fairly neat, albeit apparently under wholesale reconstruction at the moment, a bit like Janet and Mal's house.

My last appointment was to see Dr Bones, sister and brother-in-law at her father's vicarage in Ashambury near Cambridge, where he has been incumbent since Abraham was a young man. On the way I revisited Ely, its cathedral long and narrow before exploding outwards into the unique space of the Octagon - the closest medieval English cathedral architecture got to a dome.

The afforded me two contrasting museum experiences. Ely City Museum in the Old Gaol dates to 1972 but was refurbished a couple of years ago, and is now swish and stylish, designed to the hilt ...

... but some of the displays at March Museum look as though they haven't changed since about 1972, and it crams in more objects than you might think possible. It's every bit of slightly corroded farm equipment you've ever imagined, and then some more. Were I designing a museum nowadays, it would look like Ely; but I have a suspicion that March's model is more fun.