A clockwork Silver Swan - my visit to the wonderful Bowes Museum

A clockwork swan? Yes, a lifelike, life-sized beautiful silver swan that moves naturally. It was made in 1773 and is now in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle in County Durham. It 'performs' daily at 2,00pm. I was there to see the spectacle on 3rd June, and if you read on, you can see (and hear) what that performance was like.

Barnard Castle, on the edge of the North Pennines, has a wonderful asset: The Bowes Museum. This is a large and elegant building - in the style of a grand French château - on the east side of the town, set in its own grounds, that houses an astonishingly sophisticated collection of exhibits. It's as if someone cherry-picked from the main London museums (especially the V&A) and popped the goods into this amazing place. It's not at all what you would expect to find in a rural part of County Durham.

Here's the exterior.

I wasn't going to visit it at first, even though urged to do so. The website told me that, even with an age concession lopping a useful £2 off the admission cost, it would hit my purse to the tune of £12.00. Ouch! But a dull, damp day lay ahead. It might be a great way to spend an afternoon. So I negotiated the revolving entrance doors and bought a ticket. The reception desk was computerised, and paying by phone was no problem whatever.

Although externally you might think this had once been someone's Country Seat, and only lately converted to use as a museum, it had in fact been conceived and built as a museum from the start, to showcase the best of a vast series of collections made over the years by a wealthy Victorian couple, John and Joséphine Bowes, seen here in this information panel about the paintings they sought for their museum:

The Museum opened to the public in 1892 and has been going strong ever since, although I confess that until this year I'd never heard of it. The Bowes family, incidentally, were not only rich landowners in County Durham but through marriage acquired estates in Scotland too. From the Scottish side of the family came the late Queen Mother, as these information panels in the museum explained:

I once met the Queen Mother, in 1978, but that's another story.

The entrance hall was most impressive. Here are views of this lofty space, with its columns and grand staircase.

Big mirrors helped!

I began with the ground floor, and worked upwards. I was clock-watching for the first half of my visit. I hadn't known in advance that there was a clockwork swan performing at 2.00pm, but having learned that at reception, I didn't want to miss it. 

The ground floor was mostly concerned with archaeological artifacts, toys, and sundry curiosities.

Archaeologically, there was an emphasis on the Roman occupation of the North-East. The toy collection was eclectic. There were some exceptionally fine dolls. Indeed, the faces of some of them were very lifelike, and not in an entirely comfortable way. The dolls looked too adult, and some seemed unhappy, worried or perplexed.

Look at that doll in the blue dress, back centre, in the last picture: she seems to possess an inner life of her own, a rather emotional one. She's just a bit too lifelike. And the two dolls in Red Indian attire, front left, look positively anguished, as if contemplating the burning of their homes (or indeed the massacre of their tribe) by the hated White Man, as he advanced relentlessly across their ancestral lands. 

I was never into dolls when young. I didn't want a 'baby' or 'child' of my own to hold in my arms, to fuss over, dress up, and play imaginary games with. As for adults wanting to collect these things, the reason escapes me. Is it the quality of the doll's faces and costumes? Who knows. They are all too close to ventriloquists' dummies, and I find those creepy - see my post The Laughing Sailor on 5th August 2016. They were undoubtedly brilliant dolls, in a museum context, but not my cup of tea. Give me good old Buzz Lightyear every time. He was part of the toy display too. I'd happily go to infinity and beyond in his company.

In the same room was this penny-farthing bicycle...

...but next to it was a glass cabinet containing a stuffed two-headed calf. Ugh. Totally bizarre! I felt sorry for this calf, and wondered how it had survived its birth (poor mum, too) and had then lived on. I took a photo, but ditched it later. If not quite horrible, this calf was at least grotesque to behold. You have to imagine two calves merged, the heads side by side, but the legs of the second calf sticking out from the otherwise fairly normal body of the first. Not a sight I'd have wanted to see if I were a child. It makes you wonder about the things Victorians considered suitable for public display. But that was an era in which paying money to gawp at circus freaks was normal, and disfigured persons of all kinds, many of them beggars, were everyday sights. I hope that the modern reaction when seeing the dire results of poverty, malnourishment and nil healthcare would universally be to take action and help the victim, and not pay to see them. (Too much to hope for, I dare say)

I next climbed that grand staircase to the upper floors, noting where the Swan Room was. I'll leave the Swan for a little longer, and first show a sample of the many other exhibits.

Mrs Bowes had been French, and her taste was reflected everywhere, in rooms furnished in Empire style, and in paintings of the Napoleonic dynasty.

But there were also rooms dealing with other styles, all showing off the organised clutter of a High Victorian lifestyle, with objects too fussy for modern tastes but all of the finest quality and made to last.

But much of the museum's space was devoted to displaying paintings, ceramics, furniture and costume, all of which were dear to my own heart. I overloaded on it all. Some shots of these things now.

In one of the upper front wings, just off from the ceramics section, I came across a quiet space that overlooked the front grounds. A peaceful spot to sit down and rest, if one needed a rest from all the things to see. 

You can just make out Fiona in the last shot, centre, parked in the driveway. The side windows had stained glass, showing women in Renaissance poses.

Did I mention paintings? There were some very fine ones, more than you might see in most municipal art galleries.

And, of course, the museum founders.

Three things left to show you. Up first, a special exhibition by artist Jonathan Yeo, concerned with the risks and social impact of cosmetic surgery. It was a series of pictures showing women being prepared for a variety of enhancements. Here are some of the face and breast surgery pictures:

I do wonder why the lady above wanted her face 'improved'.

It was easier to understand why some women might yearn for fuller breasts. Although personally I'd be very happy to have bumps as nice as those they thought inadequate! 

It was, as intended, very thought-provoking. A few years ago, I was pretty dissatisfied with my big nose, and if funds hadn't got dangerously low, I might have seriously looked into having it reshaped. I'm so glad I didn't. Partly of course because I've avoided painful surgery! But also because in recent years my nose has subtly changed. It's still an unusual shape, still not at all pretty; but I'm sure that ageing has been good for it. It seems less fleshy to me, a thought smaller. Maybe my self-perception has developed, and I'm now prouder of my appearance, even though it's still imperfect. At any rate, I'm generally content with how I look, and disinclined to meddle, even if I had the money for it. As for my nose, I can claim that it's a nose of singular character. And definitely a Family Nose. And, thankfully, not a surgical failure, as might have turned out to be the case.

Next, costumes. The museum had a large section devoted to fashion. Let a few pictures give you an idea. This was obviously an area where items had been added to the original collection.

And finally the Swan. It was made in 1773, and the original casing has long gone. But the swan and its mechanism, and the river it sits in, with the wiggling silver fish, have survived intact (although of course discreetly repaired). It was a rich man's toy, to show off to his house guests. To see it is to marvel at what could be achieved by late-18th century craftsmen. I saved my first glimpse until close to performance-time at 2.00pm. A lot of people were already seated, and more soon came in until there was standing-room only. 

Its 'keeper' came in and opened up a flap in the side of the swan's modern casing. He turned a water tap on, and wound the clockwork up, all the time reminding us that the Swan was a Very Old And Temperamental Lady, who might decide not to do as much of her routine as usual. All we could do was hope. It was fun moving around, taking pictures of the waiting spectators. Nobody seemed to mind.

It began, to twinkling music from somewhere in the base of the casing. The Swan moved her neck, studied her keeper while he was still making little adjustments, then turned her neck in other directions, and lowering it to nibble at the fishes in front of her, who were moving too.

All the time her keeper was anxiously watching the mechanism. After several graceful neck-movements, the Swan finished. The performance had hardly lasted a minute, but had been amazing to see. Part-way through, I switched Tigerlily into video mode, with this result (click on the white arrow in the middle). 

After the crowd had dispersed, I had a good close-up look at the Swan.

I was very impressed with the Bowes Museum, and would thoroughly recommend it. It's got nice grounds too, and it's free to park. It also has a pleasant café. I enjoyed tea and cake before leaving.

Low Force

Although I enjoyed dry and sunny weather for most of my Northern England holiday, it began on a damp note, with one or two rainy spells. One downpour occurred while I was at Barnard Castle, at the bottom end of Teesdale. Once the rain had stopped, I ventured forth into the Pennines. I reckoned I would see the River Tees in spate, and I was right.

Sussex, the county I live in, is mostly a pretty place, away from the big towns anyway. The glorious South Downs; the high white chalk cliffs between Brighton and Eastbourne, that include the famous Seven Sisters and Beachy Head; the serene creeks of yachty Chichester Harbour; the mysterious Pevensey Levels; and the deer-haunted interior woodland, lovely in spring when carpeted with bluebells. But while there is some heathland, there is no wild moorland. There are no big rivers and lakes. Nor mountains and crags.

And there are no waterfalls either.

But up Teesdale there were two that I could easily reach. One was called High Force, and I've already described the troubling experience I had there when trying to park at that popular tourist spot (see The Waterfall of the Damned on 3rd June). The nearer was called Low Force. This was my main destination for the afternoon.

I parked in a layby a few hundred yards away. I donned wet-weather togs, green wellies included. It was bound to be muddy. Then I set forth. I could hear the roar of the River Tees, and there were glimpses of it through the trees that lined the banks. Getting nearer, I got a good view of the swollen and rushing waters.

Blimey. Cataracts aplenty! It wasn't Niagara Falls, but there was power in that water, and I wouldn't fancy my chances if I fell in. I was hard to believe that this was the same quiet river I'd seen, only a few miles downstream, at Wycliffe the evening before:

I was glad that I'd put wellies on. On the whole the path was OK, but in places it was rather squelchy underfoot, and there was an abiding wetness.

The main falls came nearer. Suddenly I was upon them.

Gosh. I wish my shots could convey the thunder of the water as it tipped over the hard Whin Sill rock and plunged downwards, then surged onward in its chaotic frenzy. I very carefully positioned myself for a selfie. The wet rocks were uneven and slippery, requiring care. I teetered while taking this shot. though at the same time couldn't help feeling elated. Natural delights are the best. 

That orange lifebuoy seemed a bit useless, in the face of all that rushing water!

There was something going on close by. Ah, a group of wet-suited chappies - I couldn't see any women - clustered on a ledge down by the water, with someone who was clearly an instructor. Surely they weren't going into the water...?

Oh yes they were! And backwards, to be instantly carried away downstream. 

Even though they were getting careful individual instructions, and had hard hats on, I thought this was naked madness. But some people need that adrenaline rush, don't they? I shouldn't really pass a negative opinion. I merely say that this is something I wouldn't do.

I was curious to know what happened to them around the bend. I saw a footbridge. I'd stand on it, and see them pass under. 

Hmm. It was one of those bridges suspended by wires, with not much in the way of stiffening. Those wooden boards didn't look very substantial. It would move under my feet, and probably sway from side to side. Admittedly, it wasn't a rope bridge over a chasm in the High Andes, and Indiana Jones would laugh at it. But I still quailed. I had to put a brave face on for this shot, while I hesitated and screwed up my courage for the desperate deed:

If I didn't step out on that bridge, there would be no post. So with as much fortitude as I could muster, I stepped. I clutched fast with both hands at the handrail on either side, and concentrated on not falling through the cracks in the wooden boards. Suddenly I was safely in the middle of the bridge, amazed to be alive. A man in a wet suit and hard hat whizzed underneath me before I could get my phone Tigerlily out for a tentative shot or two. But another was soon on his way.

We exchanged thumbs-up gestures as he shot under the bridge. By then, he was getting the hang of not drowning.

Downstream, I saw that several of these action men were safely together on the bank, where there must be slack water. You can just make out their orange hard hats, centre left in the next shot.

I wondered how much they paid for this two-hundred-yard scary experience. Quite a bit, I guessed. As for myself, I was glad I'd overcome my trepidation and stepped out onto the bridge. It hadn't been such a desperate experience after all. 

Within the next hour or so, some afternoon tea and cake - and well earned, I felt.  

Restored

No, not the purged posts! I mean the accidentally-deleted genealogical folder about 'myself from 2014', mostly containing photographs of my world: my home, my possessions, my special interests, and of course shots of myself. Over the last week and a half I've been re-creating that folder, which I rather stupidly wiped from my desktop PC before decommissioning it. I've copied in photos and other things from whatever other digital sources still exist. It's required patience and perseverance, but now it's done.

How much of a restoration?

That's difficult to say. I mentioned before that in March 2015 the 'Lucy' folder then in existence contained 34.6GB of genealogical material. Afterwards, I split it up into three smaller folders. The first two, between them covering my affairs up to 2013, wouldn't have grown any further. Only the folder for 2014 onwards - the one I accidentally deleted - would have continued to get larger.

The three folders (recombined for figuring purposes) now come in at 31.8GB, which is 2.8GB less than it was in March 2015. That means my restored folder (for 2014 onwards) must be light by at least 2.8GB. But of course it has to be more - over three years have passed since March 2015.

I think that if my restoration had been perfect, the three 'Lucy' folders - taken as a whole - would  now contain as much as 40GB. If that's true, then 8.2 GB (or so) is missing from the folder I've just restored. Say about 2,000 pictures.

That's quite a bit. I know that most shots of my cars and caravans for the years up to 2012 have been lost. And I've lost many shots of my home up to 2012 too. But as many as 2,000 of them? Surely not.

Well, I'm not going to do any more work on this. The restored folder is good enough as it is; it will do. And I feel very fortunate to have achieved even a two-thirds restoration.

It's time to move on. I've got posts to write! 

Purged

I've now finished my purge of posts that didn't reflect my current interests and ways of thinking.

The cull has been fairly light for the most recent years: 535 out of the 659 posts published in 2015 onward are still there, which is 81% of them.

But of course I've deleted everything before 2015. So that's really 535 posts remaining out of 1,966 published since the very beginning in February 2009. And sadly, that means overall only 27% have survived - call it a quarter - representing a fairly severe erasure of past posts.

But it had to be done. There was so much stuff that applied then but not now, and I didn't want new readers to delve into a bloated canon and find old posts that might puzzle them, and encourage them to seek answers from me. At one time, I'd oblige with alacrity. But I've grown tired of explaining myself. Nostalgic pieces aside, I want to look to the future, not backwards, and concentrate the attention of readers onto present-day interests and adventures.

What's left constitutes a slightly quirky 'holiday and special interest' blog that strays into current affairs and other subjects, including my personal and family history. I am not going to radically alter that, and I will leave the writing style unchanged.

I'm sorry if a few of your favourite posts have vanished. And their deletion means the comments have disappeared too, some of which were doubtless the product of long and careful consideration. I do have a complete private archive of all the posts I ever wrote, and some of the best-written or kindest comments have been copied with them; but surely most readers' comments have been lost forever. A pity.

Mind you, if many of the nicest comments have gone, so have most of the not-so-nice ones. Some of the responses I got in the period 2009 to 2012 were perversely argumentative, and I am glad to be rid of them. I was also on occasion unwisely provocative myself, and I can recall some silly, embarrassing posts that generated a stern reaction I well merited. These too have now thankfully passed into oblivion.

However careful you are...

For the last week or so, on and off, I've been reconstructing a large and important folder in my digital photo archive - the genealogical one of myself.

Believe it or not, I somehow managed to overlook transferring this folder to another storage medium when decommissioning my desktop PC at the end of June. For I did carry out my plan to shift all of the Photo Archive (some 105,000 pictures, plus other material) to two external drives that I could plug into my laptop - and then switch off the eleven-year-old PC forever, before it decided to retire itself without warning.

It was a massive job. I devoted a day to it. I was most methodical. I took great care. Even so, I missed one of the biggest folders, which I had kept to last. Duh.

Each of my 'genealogical' folders contain pictures of the individual concerned, and - if I have them - shots of their home, their possessions, and important documents like a birth certificate.

My own folder was no different, except that there was an awful lot more material in it than in the other 'genealogical' folders. The last General Backup for which I can quote figures for myself was the one in March 2015. In that monster backup, I preserved a copy of 13,559 'Lucy' files (mostly photos) in 347 subfolders - all relating to myself, my various homes, and my sundry possessions. In all 34.6GB worth.

That was in March 2015. Three years later, I would have surely had 40GB worth of personal stuff.  And all of that had been missed. By the time I realised (with momentary horror) what I'd done, I had wiped the PC and ripped the C: and D: hard drives out of it - it had felt like an Aztec ritual, cutting the still-warm heart out of a sacrificial victim. Electronic blood everywhere. All done without suspecting that 40GB of my life had been accidentally discarded.

Actually, I'm over-dramatising just a bit. After that March 2015 backup, I decided that it was too unwieldy to have my personal genealogical material in a single folder, and I split it up into three parts: myself up to 2008; myself 2009 to 2013; and myself from 2014. It was only the third folder that had been lost: the personal photos of the last four and a half years. Bad enough, though.

What to do now?

Well, to some extent my personal folder could be reconstructed from photos elsewhere in my collection. For instance, I have a 'Best Pictures' collection on my laptop, with an exact copy on my phone, so that one is effectively a backup for the other. It's wasn't hard to copy shots from that into my reconstruction. In fact it was a quicker job than you might think. Every one of the 105,000 digital photos retained since the year 2000 had been fully captioned. Therefore that was true of the 'Best' collection also. So if I wanted to, say, find pictures of my car Fiona, I merely had to run a search on the 'Best' folder using the keyword 'Fiona' - and voilà - there were the best shots of her, to copy and paste into a new 'Fiona' folder in my reconstruction. All the way back to 2010 when I'd bought her.

Similarly, searching my 'Best' collection with other keywords located other shots to pop into my rebooted personal folder. Searching for 'Lucy' was the easiest, naturally!

And I could be cunning with this searching. Supposing, for example, I knew there were shots of something I'd bought on a caravan holiday - a certain jacket, say - but 'jacket' yielded nothing in the search results. All was not lost. A search using the caravan site name or location might well bring forth a picture of the item, unpacked in my caravan straight after purchase. Hurrah!

But such searching wouldn't work with everything. In many cases, the captioning was never specific enough. All I could do then was wade through the 'Best' photos year by year and hope to find what I wanted. And if it wasn't there, that was that.

Though not necessarily. There were the Immediate Backups. After each photo-processing session, I'd immediately copy that batch onto a small external hard drive, into a dated folder. Plugging the Immediate Backup drive into the laptop, I was delighted to find that I could search those backups with keywords - and it still held backups of all pictures retained back to 2013. Not just the 'best'. That proved to be a fruitful source of pictures for my reconstruction.

And I could download some shots from the Cloud. Google should have a copy of every photo I've included in my blog posts back to 2009. And similarly for every shot uploaded to Flickr, and still displayed there. That said, these are, in the main, 'best' shots, and so there won't be much extra stuff in the Cloud. More particularly, there won't be much really personal stuff, as I've always been careful about what goes into the public arena. Shots of my face, yes; shots of my car, yes; shots of my caravan, yes; shots of my jewellery, yes; but not - for instance - shots of my home as it looks from the road.

Well, I'm almost at the end of my reconstruction. The new genealogical file is substantial, but decidedly slimmer than the old, because an awful lot is missing from it. Some of the lost subfolders contained all the digital shots that ever existed of certain things, not just the most recent pictures. For instance, I've lost nearly all the photos I had of my home prior to 2013 - an important loss, because it had been in the family since 2000 and I wanted to build up a full record of every room, and how the gardens fronts and rear have changed over the years. Oh well.

Nevertheless, it's a decently-informative genealogical folder. Anyone doing genealogical research in future decades will find a lot of what they want in it.

But it's not a fat folder. In Slimming World terms, it's a folder that has lost weight, gained several weight-loss certificates, and could now wear a flattering bikini if it wanted to.

The Four Alls and Laa-Laa

I've come across some unusual pub names in my extensive travels around the country, but never before this one: The Four Alls.

I was driving through the village of Ovington, which is east of Barnard Castle in County Durham. It has a village green (more on that in a moment) and an inviting-looking pub. The sign caught my eye, and I pulled in to take a closer look. What were the Four Alls?

I didn't really want to go in and ask, let alone stay and have a drink. I was eager to get back to the caravan, cook an evening meal, and relax there. Then I noticed that oblong board with four round pictures on it, one above the other. I got out of Fiona and had a closer look.

There you are. At the top of the heap, Queen Victoria, with the caption 'I govern all'. How Britannic. Next down, a Bishop, with 'I pray for all'. How helpful.  Under him, a soldier and 'I fight for all'. How reassuring. And at the bottom, a hardworking ploughman, and the wry caption 'I pay for all'. How true.

It's a comment on the hierarchical society of Britain right up to the Second World War, and more than a vestige of it remains even today. The power and pervasive public influence of the monarchy, the clergy and the military have diminished somewhat. But you can't say that they don't matter. And in any case, the downtrodden ploughman (or his modern taxpaying equivalents) is still carrying those above him, the career rulers and standard-setters. And thus will it always be so, amen.

The pub's name is obviously ironic. Almost provocatively so. And that's curious, in a part of the world formerly in the hands of heavy-handed landowners with plenty of clout. I don't know how stoutly independent a pub landlord could be in times gone by (I'm assuming the pub had the same name a hundred or more years ago) but I'd guess that if he offended the local squire or parson his trade would suffer. They might not be able to stop him opening for business, but they could see to it that his regular customers - the workmen on the local estate - stayed away. A hint of dismissal and eviction from the agent would soon frighten the men into a boycott. 

Quite possibly the pub was called something else - the Percy Arms, say - in days of yore, and the present name was invented only in the 1970s, with the rise of discerning beer-drinking among the CAMRA generation. I should look into it, rather than merely speculate. Perhaps a County Durham reader knows the facts, and will comment. It's certainly an intriguing name for a pub.

It wasn't however the only item of interest at Ovington. As I drove in, there was another sign that said this was 'The Maypole Village', and there was indeed a tall maypole on the green. 

These are rare things nowadays. Dancing around the Maypole passed from ordinary village life a very long time ago. There must have been a certain amount of upkeep necessary, and I suspect a lot of these maypoles gradually rotted away and were taken down before they fell on somebody, never to be replaced. The only other village maypole I can remember seeing within the last twenty years was in Dorset, at Sturminster Marshall. Anyway, here's the one at Ovington.

It's topped by a windvane in the shape of a running fox. And it clearly doubles as a flagpole. I wonder if, during the annual village fête, the men of the village are required to test themselves against each other by climbing to the top? I also wonder whether, on the First of May, the innocent young people of the village - or the not-so-innocent - do in fact dance around the pole, festooned with garlands of spring flowers and singing gaily. Who knows. It must in any event be an obvious magnet for Morris Dancers, especially with The Four Alls so handy! (I understand it's terribly thirsty work, Morris Dancing)

The artwork near the pole is a stylised representation of such dancing. I think it's caught the swirling ribbons quite nicely, and suggests the movement of dancers around the may pole rather well.

Naturally I couldn't resist the temptation to take a photograph with the maypole coming out of the top of my head, as if I were a latter-day Teletubby.

Cute little Laa-Laa was always my favourite. And the resemblance is uncanny.