Collections & Research

The St Fagans site isn’t usually this quiet: even on blustery November afternoons, determined (but soggy) visitors can be found walking the site, exploring the galleries and the historic buildings. This week, however, the only surge in visitors has been the amazing array of birds we’ve seen reclaiming the hedgerows and, out of necessity, brazenly venturing near the offices and mess rooms in search of food. Only last Friday I was kept company by a pair of Lapwings, who were enjoying the last of the afternoon sun outside the museum's main entrance.

The only human traffic on our pathways has been a small army of Museum Assistants, Craftspeople and Agriculturers, busy clearing snow and gritting. The textures, colours and smells of our Christmas Nights event* are now long-gone; tipp-exed out and muted. The site is eerily empty - though it is incredibly beautiful, it has not been safe enough to let visitors in on several occasions during the last week or so.

In the snow, St Teilo's Church does not look as dazzling as last year: as is the custom with traditional buildings, the bright limewash covering the outer wall has taken the brunt of the season's weather, and will be re-applied next spring when it is milder. The interior, as ever, is still as vibrant as it was when the reconstruction was officially opened in 2007, and, we hope, as it would have looked in 1500-1530.

The wall painting scheme is now finished, bar a few Latin inscriptions, which are proving harder to decipher than previously thought. The north chapel design, including figures of Saints Dewi and Teilo, as well as what is thought to be male and female portraits of local patrons, were composed by copying fragments plaster from the church in its original location. Where the plaster had deteriorated, or the pigment faded, we looked at better preserved mural sequences in Wales in order to come up with appropriate evidence for the missing parts.

While the north chapel is not directly accessible to the visiting public (partly because the east end of the church houses some of the oldest furniture in our collection), these murals are visible through the carved screens in the church. These, too, have had a new lease of life, through the work of Fleur Kelly, who has worked with our own in-house painters on several aspects of the church’s painted carvings.

If the snow holds back, the advertised guided tours of the Church will go ahead tomorrow and Friday (14-15 Jan); starting at 12:00, 13:00 and 14:00. Those interested in attending are encouraged to telephone us before starting their journey, to ensure that the museum is open and accessible, on (029) 2057 3500. The church is a ten-minute walk from the main entrance on a clear day, so please bear this in mind when choosing your footwear!
Wrap up warm, and hope to see you there!

*That's treacle; fairy lights; brass bands; bay leaves; woodsmoke and wet boots, in case you were wondering...

Festival of British Archaeology 2009

So the festival ended. After two weeks of almost continuous events across three of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’s sites. And the best was definitely saved until last.

With fine weather throughout the day The Vicus put on a fantastic show. They performed a Roman funeral ceremony in the centre of St Fagans before a crowd of two to three hundred people. A young lady played the recently departed and two gladiators fought for her.

Then the mourners processed to the funeral pyre, an impressive timber platform around which more rituals were performed, and where the young lady was substituted for a pig.

There followed tense moments for the organizers. It’s easy to schedule a cremation ritual, and building the pyre wasn’t too challenging, but with all the wet weather the day before, would it light? With a hundred and fifty people watching as a fire brand was thrust into the middle of the pyre, a fizzle would not have looked good.

But good fortune smiled and the pyre lit, smoking heavily before the flames spread. The grave goods on the pyre were quickly burnt or broken, with one glass bottle melting in the heat.

It burnt for the rest of the afternoon, until by closing time on the site there was just a bed of ash with the unburnt back of the pig resting on top. By next morning almost all of this had burnt away and we set about recovering the cremated bones and the grave goods for further analysis.

Cremated remains are common finds from the Bronze Age and Roman periods and our work here will go some way to helping interpret these finds when they come up in future. So a great spectacle and a useful source of data.

Festival of British Archaeology 2009

This weekend is the grand finale of the Festival events, and it started dreadfully. Torrential rain all night and no let-up until eleven o’clock, but much happened before then.

First thing in the morning The Vicus, anamazing Iron Age / Roman re-enactment group, arrived in force and took over our Celtic Village and the grounds around it. Our wood shelter became an armoury, the roundhouses were taken over for cooking and crafts, and outside the village our old furnace was fired up and used to smelt iron ore.

Things really got under way once the rain had cleared and the ground started to dry. Then it was a continuous stream of visitors for the rest of the day.

For me the highlights were:

- the trimmed down combat display where the Vicus’s British warriors and Roman soldiers showed off their equipment and demonstrated the various merits of a range of spears. It was a trimmed down display because the rain had left things too wet underfoot for full-scale combat. But the forecast is good for the rest of the weekend, so tomorrow’s performance should be the full extravaganza.

- watching the bloom come out of the furnace around 4:30. The Vicus’s blacksmith has yet to pass judgement on the results, but they certainly looked pretty good. And when one considers that things only really got started around midday they seemed almost miraculous.

So tomorrow is the big one. In the Celtic Village we have a repeat of all of the above  (with bronze casting substituted for iron smelting), and the festival will be brought to a show-stopping conclusion with a reenactment of a Roman cremation cemetery. Fingers crossed the weather stays with us.

Festival of British Archaeology 2009

On Wednesday and Thursday this week (29th and 30th July) Sue Fielding and Geoff Ward from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales demonstrated building recording at St Fagans. Thanks to them, visitors had the chance to record a 500 year old house, Hendre’r Ywydd Uchaf, which once stood near Ruthin in the Vale of Clwyd.

I couldn't get to the event myself,  but Adam Gwilt who helped organise things sent in this report.

"Geoff has been getting people to look more carefully at the way the house was built and showing young and old alike how to measure and draw the exposed timbers of a wall partition inside the house.

Sue has been enlisting the help of people, using the ‘total station’ survey equipment. Using a laser beam to record the dimensions and details of one of the rooms, a 3D drawing of the room has grown in front of our eyes on the laptop computer screen. 

On Wednesday, the stream of people was slow but constant, though the torrential rain all day affected the numbers of visitors. After early showers on Thursday, the much improved weather brought people to us in significant numbers, at times queuing to enter the house to see what was going on! 

We used a red flag banner to let visitors know that something was going on in this house in the large museum grounds, while the additional building trail developed for the Festival has helped some children to hunt for evidence relating to the long use of this building.

The event was a great success with Sue commenting: ‘Many children have really enjoyed using our new survey equipment to generate an immediate visual and digital drawing of this historic house. I was really pleased that the Royal Commission was asked to contribute to the Festival events hosted by the national museum.’ "

Festival of British Archaeology 2009

A few photos from last weekend's "Magic flute" event in which Gareth Riseborough tried to make replicas of a medieval and a possible Neolithic flute.

He was successful in both projects. The medieval flute plays very well and looks fantastic. The Neolithic whistle looks the piece, but is very difficult to play - no fault of Gareth's there, the reason he was trying to replicate the original was to see whether it was actually a whistle, or whether it might have been simply a dog-chewed bone.