The Wayside Museum and Trewey Mill - Zennor.

 
My friend Emily came to stay last week and we spent a lovely time driving around Cornwall's far west - my favourite part I have to say. I know this part of the world very well and I would recommend anyone explore its stunning coastline full of hidden valleys, remote farms, old mines, standing stones and bronze age boulder walls, but when we stopped at Zennor to go for a walk, eat more cake and look at the beautiful ancient carved mermaid in the church (15th century and do research the folk tale!)

I finally went into the small Wayside Museum. I'd always noticed the sign for this small museum, hanging next to an old working waterwheel, but somehow never had the time when I was there to explore properly. The museum is certainly in one of the most stunning positions of any in England, situated in a 16th miller's cottage and old (yet still working!) watermill, nestling into the rugged coast staring out over the Atlantic.

You enter the museum through the shop which is well equipped with souvenirs and a good selection of books about and based in Cornwall. It also sells local Moomaid of Zennor ice cream - you've got to love ice cream that is both site-specific and involves a pun - and organic flour milled on the premises. We were welcomed by a really friendly lady and the entrance was reasonable at £3.95 for adults. Children cost £2.95, which includes a quiz trail to follow. There are also family tickets available. Leaving the shop we walked through the lovely garden to the first building, and then followed the advised route through a network of mill buildings to the cottage. I really loved the feeling of exploring this conjured - how I was never quite sure when I was going to find another building and what it might contain. There was a real sense of adventure to this - also the museum is much larger than I had guessed from outside!

In terms of what was on display there was everything to do with local residents since 3000 BC to the 1950s! There are 5000 artifacts from prehistoric boulders, to milling and farming equipment, displays about local residents, ancient washing machines, packaging, photos, the actual mill itself, tools - there's too much to list really, but it was all very interesting. Two of my favourite things were the charm stick hanging above the fire place in the cottage - the story here is that if devils came down the chimney during the night they would become transfixed by the bubbles in the glass and you could just wipe them off with a cloth in the morning! - and I also loved some of the stories about local characters. These included a man who'd had I think 27 children as a competition and another about a local poet who liked writing about death and destruction. I have tried to include photos of some of this text, but I only had my phone in a darkened room so I don't know how legible they are... There were also some great photos of Cornish grannies. I also loved seeing the working water wheel outside. All in all it was a really great impromptu museum visit and I would recommend tearing yourself away from the stunning landscape for a minute to learn a bit about the fascinating human history of this remote bit of England as well. It's eccentric and lovely and the effort in collecting such a vast selection of items covering such a long span of time is very impressive and worth paying respect to. Do go to the church to say hello to the mermaid too though! Or morveren as they call them in these parts...

The World of Model Railways - Mevagissey.

These days when people talk about collectors and how collections can create a whole different world for the collector, they often refer to those of the Comicon persuasion and the escaping into a ready made fantasy world. But I've always been more fond of the homemade, and for me the ultimate example of homemade worlds in model collecting is those of the thousands of dedicated model railway enthusiasts. Now I have a confession to make straight away, which society would say goes against my age and gender - I really want a train set - have done for ages - I'd go the whole hog and have a room dedicated to my own crazy train set diorama and it would probably involve dinosaurs and imaginary cities, and most certainly go around the wall like a rollercoaster, and I'd really want a monorail and chair lift. And a volcano and a secret garden. And the amazing thing is if I had the space there is no reason why I couldn't do this - model railways enable us to collect the objects we're fascinated with, i.e. trains, and then bring them to life in a living diorama - the dioramas of the giant collections of the pre 19th century might have done this, but these days they rarely do. With all this in mind I set off for the small fishing town of Mevagissey to visit somewhere I had always seen the sign for and wondered about - The World of Model Railways...

Founded by Arthur Howeson and opened to the public in 1971, the World of Model Railways is situated in an old pilchard plant up a side street in Mevagissey. It was instantly popular and at a time without many purpose built visitor attractions in Cornwall there were queues down the street! It was a little quieter when I went but I was glad as it meant I could get a really good look at Arthur's railway world. 

Built in three sections over time, the main railway display loops round a dividing wall leading the visitor through the world. (There is also a later built diplay of a railway one could make ouside, also using Thomas the Tank Engine to appeal to kids, but I'm going to focus on the main display). We move through town and countryside - there are garages, stations, markets, even a wonderful china clay pit display making it very local! I loved the details - all the people and movement - the events enfolding such as fires waiting to be put out, barges on water or horses playing. At the end the display builds towards an amazing Alpine scene, with yes a chairlift! There's even handgliders! I love how the display's narrative element enables us to make up our own stories about what's going on, and for me echoes the real experience of sitting on a train and watching the world go by - it crystallises those glimpses of other lives and parts of countries we only get to briefly see. I also loved the display cabinets or Arthur's other locomotives and the circus display, which reminded me of the model circus I used to have that was one of my most prized toys when younger. (There was also a somewhat esoteric display of the results of a ferrero rocher box diorama competition - I find such things quite splendid, but it also illustrates one of the joys of small museums and personal collections for me - you get to see the quirks that would be left out of larger institutions, but maybe would have been in a magpie collection of the past - there is a real sense of the personal, but also a community of enthusiasts...).

Reading about the history of its construction I loved discovering that an army of local lads helped out, making this a real community project. I was greeted by really friendly older men (who liked my train skirt I was wearing in honour of my visit) and I wonder now whether they could have been some of the men who helped build it originally. They were certainly knowledgeable and there was a great model shop that doubles as the entrance.  The railway was sold in the '90s and six months later Arthur passed away. This was when things such as the Thomas outdoor display were added to appeal to a more commercial audience, but whilst now being run more as a business I do not believe that the railway can have lost much of its original scope and charm. This still comes across as the work of real enthusiasts - people who really care about model railways - and I hope it will stay that way for generations to come.

More details can be found at www.model-railway.co.uk
I apologise for the bad camera phone in a dark room photos!

Found window museum of the day - Fowey.

When pottering around Fowey, Cornwall, yesterday afternoon I passed this! It's just someone's private collection they've chosen to display for passers by. museeme applauds such things! I apologise for the bad quality reflecting camera phone photography... Dinky toys, telephones, and there were some lovely old coins and stamps in the corner that I just couldn't get a clear photo of. I nearly knocked at the door as I nosily peered inside and there was a lot more!

The Lost Gardens of Heligan

I always knew I wanted to somehow incorporate gardens into this blog. Indeed the history of collecting would be somewhat more barren without the early plant collectors who travelled the world finding exotic specimens to bring back home. So when I was thinking about places to visit, Heligan with its wealth of ancient plants seemed a logical first garden to write about. But this article is going to be very different from how I first anticipated. I knew that Heligan was home to a National Collection status wealth of rhododendrons and camellias, but as soon as I visited I realised it was much more interesting in terms of thinking about collecting - this is not a collection as possession of obviously beautiful plants, but a collection of memories, history and atmosphere - a garden as a living evolving museum, devoid of any of the sterile and static connotations that word may have (and shouldn't have in my opinion - the best museums feel like they have their own life). And really this makes complete sense when thinking of many great gardens - when I was growing up we often used to visit the wonderful gardens at Stourhead in Wiltshire and I often thought about how here someone was yes "curating" the landscape, but for future generations - the original gardeners would probably have never lived to see the "end results", if there is every such a thing, of their efforts. Heligan is a very different place to Stourhead, but it illustrates for me beautifully how when thinking of place, the definition of museums and curating and collecting grows too - how it evolves with the natural world and this is both moving and fascinating to me. It is not so much about cataloguing and containment, but setting a collection free to see what happens - the garden is almost curating itself.

In the wonderful booklet about the history of Heligan available in the shop we gain a wonderful insight via documentary evidence and stories into the people who have formed Heligan over hundreds of years, and it seems to me that the garden is as much a curation of their stories as of the plants. It talks of how in the early days when Tim Smit discovered it buried by nature they also found personal artefacts such as a zinc bucket of coal, a rusty pair of scissors, an enormous kettle hidden in ferns. These offered inspiration for what Heligan was going to be - these simple everyday objects held stories that deserved to be uncovered. This came to a head when in the Thunderbox room, I believe an old loo, they found ancient graffiti of the names of ordinary people who had worked there. This discovery was to become the driving force behind the project - to restore the gardens, but to uncover its whole social history and personal memories. It is as if the work of those that nurtured it through the years are part of the soil. And there is so much deeply moving history - many workers lost their lives in the world wars, and there is a shared sense of this loss. A pervading melancholy amongst the beauty that feels a more fitting war memorial than any stone monument. It keeps memories alive rather than petrifies these names. I recommend everyone who visits to buy this history book as it tells the stories of these individuals in a deeply poignant way.

The booklet is full of photos and old postcards of Heligan that remind me of ghosts - a gentle haunting. They follow the garden from its heyday through requisition when the house became a military hospital, to tenant owners and then its sad gradual decline from the 1940s until Tim discovered it in the early '90s. This sense of rescue and nurturing back from a decline again illustrates for me how this is not so much a curation in the normal sense as a work of nurturing - of curation as care giving and respect for plants, the random found objects (there is an old boiler that is anthropomorphised in the guide as it looks like it has a face - it seems the workers see even the inanimate objects as somehow pets - I love this), and the past. There is a humility as opposed to omnipotent quest for possession and knowledge as can be seen in some collectors. In the history booklet it says they wanted to let the past find its own place, and I think this is apparent.

Of course all this is not to forget the sheer beauty and delight of the gardens. I entered near the fabulous collection of rhododendrons and camellias and wandered around the paths, past twisting trunks and a wonderful strange mound that is believed to be an Armada beacon! There is a crystal grotto waiting to be cleaned up so it can sparkle, a lovely little wishing well hiding in the shade and the perfect bath for birds. There were extraordinary working gardens of vegetables and flowers - Heligan is very much a productive garden and they sell their produce in the shop and use it in the (really good) cafe. I particulary loved the old beaver-tailed glass greenhouses and trained fruit trees. There is a melon garden, and one of my favourite things an ancient pineapple pit with an early heating system! I wandered under an arch of apple blossom drinking in my favourite flower smell of wallflowers. On the sunny day it was, it was magical. I should also mention the amazing old bee boles - little doors in the wall with baskets for bees in!

After exploring the sundial garden with its magnificent wisteria and the graves of past Heligan pets around a tree trunk (again that wonderful sense of personal history), I walked back round and down to the orchard with its fabulous black ducks and on through a field of Dexter  cows to what is known as the Jungle. In the early days of Heligan it was a Japanese garden, but over the decades it developed into a place to experiment with exotic plants - something that is continued today.  Giant rhododendrons tower over ponds and bamboo and all sorts of exotic treats that flourish in its microclimate - it can be a few degrees warmer than that rest of the gardens! Something written in the history guide summed it up for me beautifully - it was described as an exotic essay - textual foliage written on the Cornish landscape. And somehow this sums up the gardens for me - they are both of another place and rooted both metaphorically and literally in the Cornish soil. And this textural foliage writes not just the stories of the plants but of the people who planted and enjoyed them. It is garden as living book - waiting to be read and explored and continued with every new person who discovers its delights. The lost gardens of Heligan have well and truly been found.

I would recommend that every visitor to Cornwall comes here. More details can be found on their very informative website www.heligan.com

Armada beacon!

Pineapple pit!

Wishing well!

Black ducks!

The Jungle

Witch's broom