Posts Tagged ‘museum’

Bunratty Castle is a castle and folk park that is open to the public. Folk parks are living museums where traditional buildings have been relocated and are often populated with staff playing characters and or demoing 19th century trades. We’ve done St Fagans and Ulster and this one was also good.

Ulster was excellent: great role-plays and lots of cool stuff. But it was quite spread out. Bunratty was all a little more compact and the map was spot on so it was easy to find your way around.

Ulster Folk Museum is an outdoor village located in Belfast where you can learn about traditional living. There are a bunch of shops, houses, mills and churches, some of which are replicas and some of which are originals that have been moved brick-by-brick from various parts of Northern Ireland.

The main area contains a few streets with different shops in. Some of them are real shops such as the sweet shop and fully licensed pub. Many others act as a living museum. On the day we went there was a weaver using a wooden loom, a doctor who gave me and little bear a brief examination, some knitting, and traditional museum. There is also a tea room that offers hot and cold food.

The day we went was Ferguson Tractor Day. Harry Ferguson, co-founder of the Ferguson-Brown Company (now known as Massey Ferguson) was born in County Down and each year the museum hosts a rally for traditional Ferguson tractors. This included plowing demonstrations and a best tractor of the show award.

As a result, the place was rammed and there were parking cars on any spare scrap of land they had. It was very well organised, though. They had plenty of people to deal with the traffic and plenty of staff on in the tea room as well, o you were never queuing for long.

Outside of the main area they have various other buildings to explore and a farm with cows, chickens, geese and pigs.

Might be a bit grim on a rainy day and the paths on the map were not always accurate. But otherwise I would really recommend this museum. There is plenty to see, the demonstrations are good, they had colouring for the kids and on a nice day it is a beautiful walk, too.

In January, there was internet outrage regarding a photo of school children in an art gallery. They were sat by The Night Watch by Rembrandt. However, instead of looking at the artwork, they were all looking at their phones. Many described it as the death of civilisation.

Later, a teacher named José Picardo responded, pointing out that the kids were actually using the musuem’s app to learn more about the painting. He also posted another photo from a few minutes before showing the students diligently studying the painting.

So much for that then.

But suppose they were just checking Facebook instead of looking at the artwork. So what? As soon as old people (I include myself in this group, as I probably don’t qualify as a young person anymore) see this they ask “what is wrong with the younger generation?” However, there is no reason to assume it is young people that are broken. Maybe what we should be asking is “why is this art gallery so shit that people would rather check their phones?”

Have you been to an art gallery? It’s really boring. Whenever a group of friends and I visit a museum, we can maybe do an hour before at least some of the group are bored. Maybe the difference is that the young people, as ever, remain the most honest critics.

You can argue that young people have no attention span, because it has been ruined by the culture of immediacy. Yet somehow they manage to sit through films at the cinema, or much longer sporting events, without exploding.

I don’t know what the answer is to making art galleries and museums more engaging to a younger audience (or any audience). However, blaming the children does not sound like the answer.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum, better known as the penis museum, houses the world’s largest collection of animal penises. The collection has been going since 1974 when it was founded by Sigurður Hjartarson. It now has 282 specimens from 93 different species.

A lot of the species come from around the Iceland area, and whale penises are featured heavily. They are huge.

There are many other animals also, and even some folklore penises: such as troll penis and elf penis. The museum now has several human penises too, after several people offered to donate theirs after their death.

The museum is based in one room, with some side compartments, so will not take you long to get round. It is worth the visit just for the novelty of it. They do some nice merchandise too.

The museum in Llandrindod Wells had “draws of discovery” where you opened a draw to see what was inside. One of which was this.

A dolphin skeleton. They don’t feel much likes the clowns of the sea when you see how many teeth they have.

Every single diorama in this museum depicted one animal eating another.

The history of life exhibit finished by talking about modern times – including a chainsaw, skateboard, first aid kit and mobile phone.

Roughly translated, this means “an exhibition on animal poo”.

Having had to make a last minute cancellation of my trip down to London to attend the BHA AGM, I decided to head down to Leeds City Museum to attend the HSoWY summer social. Given how many people are away over summer, especially for HSoWY, it was quite a respectable turn out, and the city museum is always worth a visit.

On Thursday myself and Kieran braved the bitter cold to go for a wander round Kirkstall Abbey. A lot of it was unfortunately closed off but we got round the main parts and the visitor’s centre which was informative if a little brief.

Friday saw A-Soc hit Leeds City Museum to take a look round the exhibit, notably the first edition of Origin of Species. We spent a good hour or two looking round the museum before they kicked us out, which is enough time to get round most of the stuff anyway. Unfortunately we forgot to get a group photo on the steps but there will be plenty of other opportunities no doubt.

We finally made it to the Leeds Museum on Sunday and while we only had an hour or so to get round it, it was quite interesting none the less. It was a little more grand than I had expected with a large arena style room in the centre and plenty of winding staircases with different exhibits on the different floors.

We made it round most of it in the time we were in there but most of it in a rush so we could have easily spent a few more hours in there. All in all, worth a visit though nothing spectacular.