: Health, Wellbeing and Amgueddfa Cymru

I live far away from my site and in the summer I dust off my bike ready for some epic commuting. Like many organisations, Amgueddfa Cymru has introduced a Cycle to Work scheme, so I thought that I would share my story (or part of it) and offer guidance to anyone that's unsure of getting into cycling.

I got my first road bike on a similar scheme about twelve years ago and have never looked back. Well, I say that but my first few commutes were hard, having never ridden on roads before and going from a background in running, to riding 40 miles on the road followed by another 40 home. I distinctly remember not being able to walk up the stairs at work and having chronic back ache on the bike, but now, even in my mid-forties, I am fitter than ever. I can even fix a puncture now which I couldn’t for the first five years!

An epic commute

In early summer I travel once a week from Raglan on the lanes to Newport then on to Cardiff via the levels - 34 miles in all. This is soon to extend to Monmouth (40 miles) and then my once-a-year full 50-mile commute will switch to through the Forest of Dean, Lydney, Chepstow, and then on through Newport. For these distances, time is obviously a factor and so I tend to ride fast - aiming at 20 mph average, but even carrying a laptop it is possible. However, beware of the dreaded headwind…. but that’s another story.

Cycling wasn’t always easy

The effect cycling has on you is gradual, but very positive. It is much better on the joints than running, but the difference it will make depends on many factors including how often and how long you cycle for, but also the intensity – uphill is more of a workout than the flat. When cycling for the first time the aches can be a little disconcerting – after my first long-distance commute it felt like my kneecaps were being pushed apart, but it was because I had none of the type of muscles used for cycling. I have no such issues now.

Your body adapts

I find now, that when I arrive at work I am fine and refreshed, but that has not always been the case. When I first started I would be quite tired, but your body adapts. I should say that I came from a very active background of training and playing at a high level of field hockey three times a week for about 20 years, but your body adapts. The running gave me a great overall fitness level but with the wrong muscles. Someone recently told me that cycling is a great leveler – in that you can continue to ‘perform’ at a really high level far longer than any running-based sport. My cycling times this year are significantly faster than when I was in full hockey training!

Commuting with a laptop and other tips

I carry a medium-sized rucksack and have my laptop case inside (without the charger to save weight – as they plug in at work anyway). Then a bag of clothes to change into and lots of food for lunch. Everything in the bag is inside several plastic bags in case of rain. I have some very small bags attached to my bike for my spare inner tubes and other repair kit things.

The ups and downs of cycling and things to think about

Bikes are a big outlay in cost now, but you save on parking, fuel, and general wear and tear on a car. The play off is that your journey takes a lot longer. If you walk or use a bus, then cycling might actually be quicker and also save money. The cold and wet of winter can put people off, but there are now many options for warm, windproof, and rainproof clothes. I find getting ready once at work slightly longer than if I drive – e.g. locking up my bike, getting changed, etc. but certainly manageable.

Reaching new heights

Now, several bike upgrades later and a house move even further into the back of beyond, I lead club bike rides of a hundred miles or more and have an obsession with climbing steep hills. This is a far cry from my early commuting experiences where I dreaded the hill up through Chepstow. On Saturday 24th June I took part in a challenge organised by Chepstow Cycling Club in aid of the Brecon Beacon Mountain Rescue. It involved ten ascents of Llangynidir Hill - most people’s idea of hell. It wasn’t a race, but remarkably I was the first competitor to complete the reps. The stats: 4,325 m of ascent, 124 km distance, and 6 and a half hours of cycling.

“Re-engage provides vital, life-enhancing social connections for older people at a time in their lives when their social circles are diminishing.”

https://www.reengage.org.uk/   

For over a decade we have been working with ReEngage (formerly Contact the Elderly), hosting regular tea parties at some of our museums for older people experiencing loneliness and isolation.

The first tea parties took place at National Museum Cardiff, initially 4 times a year, but as the group grew this increased to 8 parties per year, hosted between National Museum Cardiff and St Fagans National Museum of History.  

The tea parties enable group members to visit the museums in a safe and supported way, meet their friends, make new social connections and spend time exploring the museums collections through engaging activities and talks with members of staff. And there’s always plenty of tea and cake!  

During this time, we have built strong links with the group members and Jane Tucker, the group leader. Ahead of the tea parties we have conversations with Jane to make sure we are aware of any accessibility, mobility and other needs within the group to ensure we can tailor the sessions accordingly.  

Here Jane tells us a little more about how the tea parties started and her role in supporting the group:

“I started volunteering with Re-engage (or Contact the Elderly as it was then) in March 2013 as a driver.

On a visit to St Fagans (funnily enough) in approximately 2017, I happened to see Marion Lowther who, at the time, was the Re-Engage organiser for Wales.  She told me she had a group of about 6 guests but no coordinator.  At the time they were only meeting 4 times a year as the only host available was National Museum Cardiff, hence why we are called the Cardiff Museum group.  I volunteered to take over the group and have managed to get more hosts and more guests.  The Museums are always a favourite of the group because you always provide interesting talks and activities.  

As you know a lot of our ladies are quite frail and are unable to leave their homes unaccompanied.  The visits to the Museum are a real highlight for them and we are so grateful for your continued support.” (Jane Tucker, ReEngage Group Leader).

In March of this year the group visited National Museum Cardiff for a session all about the current BBC 100 Exhibition, exploring the 100 year history of the BBC in Wales. 

The session was run by two members of the museum learning team, Jo and Louise. They used fun informal quizzes to highlight the exhibition content in a comfortable setting, as navigating the exhibition itself would have been challenging for the group members. Jo ran a TV picture quiz focussed on TV in the 60’s and 70’s and Louise ran a short TV theme tune quiz. 

Jo and Louise said “The group enjoyed chatting about their memories and there was lots of reminiscing about visits to the museum with children and grandchildren. They really enjoyed their tea!” 

Jane said following the visit “the talk we had at National Museum Cardiff was great, when the 2 hosts were playing music from old television programmes and adverts.  Our guests had lots of fun trying to recognise the tunes and then talking about the old programmes.”

The groups last visit to St Fagans took place in May 2023, facilitated by two members of the St Fagans learning team, Hywel and Jordan.

Jordan explains: “After introducing them to the site we gave a talk about the ‘Cynefin’ work being developed in our school learning programme, using the Wales is... gallery, exploring individual senses of identity and how we can use objects to support the sharing of these stories. Then, we discussed the groups’ personal understandings of their ‘Cynefin’, using handling objects from the museum collection to spark memories and conversation. Handling objects like the darning mushroom, pre decimalisation coinage and green shield stamps, proofed to be popular talking points for the group, encouraging them to shared stories of living in Wales and other parts of the world, their experiences of using everyday objects like this and changes over time.”

Here’s what some of the group members said about taking part following the session:  

“Most enjoyable afternoon at St Fagans Museum. It is lovely to see other people to chat with as I spend a lot of time alone.  It’s really appreciated.” (Anne)

“I really enjoyed the talk about the museum and the work they are doing.  Sundays can be really lonely so having a Re-Engage tea is such a joy and something to look forward to.” (Rita)

“Handling the objects at the Museum was really fun as well as informative. It gets your brain working and brings back memories.” (Hazel)

We’ll be welcoming the group back to St Fagans this summer to take part in some traditional yarn crafts inspired by our textile collections. Then they’ll be returning to National Museum Cardiff this autumn autumn.  

The museum learning team and group members alike always look forward to the tea parties. Over the past 10 years they have grown to become a key fixture in our wider Health and Wellbeing programme. Long may they continue!  

With thanks to all the ReEngage group members for sharing their stories, thoughts and feedback. Looking forward to seeing you next time!

Amgueddfa Cymru Museum Wales have been working with Refugees and Asylum Seekers, supporting people to integrate into their new communities for many years. 

As part of this work, we have developed partnerships with key organisations such as Addysg Oedolion Cymru Adult Learning Cymru. They have been working with us over the past year, alongside their ESOL students, to develop new ESOL learner resources designed to support people learning English to explore our museums and galleries. 

The new resources cover the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, the National Slate Museum in Llanberis and the National Roman Legion Museum in Caerleon. 

The resources have been created by ESOL tutors and tested by ESOL learners. They follow the ESOL curriculum and cover a range of different levels from Entry to Level 2. 

Now that the new resources have been tested, tweaked, and trialed they are ready to download from our website for any ESOL learner or group visiting one of the museums. (See the links above). 

We also have a suite of ESOL resources for St Fagans National Museum of History which were developed in a similar way as part of the HLF funded Creu Hanes Making History Project in 2014. 

We continue to work with our partners and community members to provide meaningful opportunities for people facing barriers to participation in the arts and cultural heritage. 

We learn so much from the people who visit our sites and engage in the learning opportunities we offer. 

Supporting those people who are newly arrived in Wales to settle and integrate into their new communities is a very important area of our work and we hope that these new learner resources help many people on that journey. 

Diolch yn fawr to Addysg Oedolion Cymru Adult Learning Wales and the ESOL tutors and learners who have contributed to the creation of these new learner resources. 

In April 2022, we launched Museums Inspiring Memories , a three year partnership project between Amgueddfa Cymru and Alzheimer’s Society Cymru. Funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, it aims to explore how we can use our seven museums and collections to improve the health and wellbeing of people  affected by dementia.

Why this project is important

 People living with dementia and those supporting and caring can often experience reduced social contact, social isolation, low confidence, anxiety and other mental health concerns. In response, research has shown that museum-based interventions are an important way of promoting the engagement and well-being of people living with dementia.[1]

“There are feelings and emotions I get from seeing things in museums, like the terraced houses here at St. Fagans. There is an overwhelming feeling you only get when you can physically touch or see real life things – like the memories of my grandparents that come back. Museums are so important for people with dementia. They are wonderful places and overwhelming at the same time.”

Person living with dementia

What has been done already?

Amgueddfa Cymru began it’s journey to become more dementia-friendly back in 2015. Between then and 2018, people affected by dementia were invited to take part in accessibility audits across three of our museums. Following this, our successful dementia -friendly underground tours at Big Pit were developed, both with and for people affected by dementia. Other pieces of work include a Young Onset Dementia Walking Group at St Fagans and an Intergenerational Group at Big Pit: National Coal Museum. 

This work reflects our commitment, made in Amgueddfa Cymru’s Strategy 2030, to support well-being through the creation of inspirational spaces and experiences, putting people at the heart of what we do so that our museums are inclusive and accessible places for everyone. 

Our Consultations

Between December 2022 and March 2023, the Museums Inspiring Memories team  have been inviting people living with dementia, carers (both unpaid and from the sector), colleagues from the heritage sector and from representative organisations to join us at gatherings both in our museums and at community venues across Wales. The team have also been out and about speaking with community groups and care home residents. So far, 183 people have joined us. 

These conversations have been a real opportunity to draw upon and capture the lived experiences of people affected by dementia and those within the heritage sector, finding out more about the barriers faced by people affected by dementia in engaging with museums, and looking at how we can develop our sites and staff to become more dementia supportive. 

Here are just a few quotes from those who joined us, when asked what they enjoyed about the consultation:

“Hearing the views of people living with dementia, their carers and those working with those with dementia, informative and thought-provoking" A member of a representative organisation

 “Meeting other people and comparing their needs and problems with ourselves” A person affected by dementia

 “I have enjoyed meeting everyone and the enthusiastic staff leading the project. I feel extremely pleased to have been able to contribute. I look forward to hearing how the project develops” A Carer

“The range of the project is impressive with all the facilities of the Museums available but I found that it was one simple object that triggered memories and conversations at the event I attended in Blaenavon. This was an old postcard with some photographs of Porthcawl on the front. This immediately opened up so many memories of summer holidays, Sunday school outings, day trips. One of the group remembered the taste of the deep fried donuts! One simple postcard and we were back there…all talking about it, carers and people affected by dementia alike.

“I hope this project thrives as it will make a difference to people’s lives. I am pleased to support and promote it when I work across South Wales.”

Chris Hodson, Information Worker at Alzheimer’s Society Cymru

Next steps

Over the next few months we will be inviting people to join our Dementia Voice in Heritage Group. This will include people living with dementia, unpaid carers, care sector staff, heritage sector colleagues , who together will help to steer and shape the work of the project over the next two years as we develop and deliver a meaningful programme of activities, both at our museums and within communities.

Who to contact

The Museums Inspiring Memories Team at Amgueddfa Cymru are: 

Sharon Ford – Programme Manager

Gareth Rees – Dementia Voice Lead

Fi Fenton – Administrative Officer

If you would like to learn more about the work of this project, or find out what opportunities there are to being involved, please email Gareth on gareth.rees@museumwales.ac.uk or phone 029 2057 3418, or you can email our team MIMS@museumwales.ac.uk 

 

---

[1]  Zeilig, H, Dickens, L & Camic, P.M. “The psychological and social impacts of museum-based programmes for people with a mild-to-moderate dementia: a systematic review.” Int. J. of Ageing and Later Life, 2022 16 (2); 33-72

Unusual new fossils from ancient rocks in Wales

What did you do during the Covid-19 lockdown?  Did you enjoy getting closer to nature and seeing new things in your local area during your daily walks?  Two of the Museum’s Honorary Research Fellows, Dr Joe Botting and Dr Lucy Muir, did just that and more, when they discovered a treasure trove of new fossils near their home in mid-Wales.  Unable to travel far or access Amgueddfa Cymru facilities to further their work on ancient life, these independent researchers crowdfunded to buy microscopes that would allow them to study their new finds in detail.  The fossils belong to a variety of different animal groups, some of them rarely fossilized because they have soft bodies with no hard shells, bones or teeth.  Joe and Lucy are working with other palaeontologists from around the world to study the fossils and decipher what they can tell us about life in Wales’ seas over 460 million years ago. 

In a paper just published in the journal Nature Communications - led by Dr Stephen Pates of Cambridge University and also involving Dr Joanna Wolfe of Harvard University, Joe, Lucy and colleagues describe two highly unusual fossils from the new site.  The fossils are tiny, entirely soft-bodied animals that resemble a bizarre creature called Opabinia, which lived in Canada over 40 million years earlier.  A similar animal called Utaurora was described from rocks of a comparable age in the USA.  Whether the Welsh fossils represent true cousins that belong in the same family as the North American creatures is uncertain, but they certainly reveal that strange ‘opabiniid’- like animals lived in the seas for much longer than previously thought and had a wider geographical range.

Where are the fossils from?

The fossils were discovered in a quarry on private land not far from Llandrindod Wells (the exact location is being kept secret to protect the site).  The rocks in which the fossils were found were laid down under the sea during the Ordovician period, over 460 million years ago, a time when what is now mid Wales was covered by an ocean, with a few volcanic islands here and there.

What kind of animals were they?

The Welsh fossils resemble strange animals known as ‘opabiniids’, until now only known from much older rocks from the Cambrian period.  They lived in the sea and were soft-bodied, with a long narrow trunk which had a row of flaps along each side, thought to have been used for swimming, and pairs of stumpy triangular legs on the underside. At one end of the trunk, there was a fan-like tail. 

Their most distinctive feature was at the other end - a long proboscis sticking out the front of the head, looking a bit like the hose of a vacuum cleaner.  In contrast to the Cambrian opabiniids, the proboscis of the Welsh species bears a row of small spines.  The proboscis is thought to have been flexible, perhaps used to pick up bits of food off the seabed and to move them to the mouth, which lay behind it on the underside of the head.  Both the legs and the proboscis were ‘annulated’, meaning they were made up of lots of ring-like segments.  However, these were not truly ‘jointed’ in the way that a crab or spider’s legs are jointed.  Opabiniids are thought to share a distant ancestor with these and other modern jointed-limbed animals known as ‘arthropods’, but weren’t direct ancestors of them.

The larger of the two fossils is 13 mm long, including a 3 mm long proboscis. The smaller one is just 3 mm, with its proboscis making up just under a third of its total length.  There are some differences between the two fossils that suggest that the smaller one may be an earlier growth stage of the larger species, or it may represent a different species entirely.  In any case, both Welsh individuals were much smaller than Opabinia, whose fossils are up to 7 cm long. 

A Welsh name for a Welsh wonder!

All species, living or extinct, have a scientific name made up of two parts, a genus name and a species name.  One of the new fossil animals has been given the scientific name Mieridduryn bonniae.  The species name is after Bonnie, niece of the owners of the land where the fossil was found and fossil fan, in recognition of the family’s support and enthusiasm for the work being carried out on the fossils.  It’s fairly common for new species to be named after people linked to their discovery or who have done a lot of work on related species. The genus name is more unusual and comes from the Welsh words for bramble, mieri and snout or proboscis, duryn.  It was inspired by the small thorn-like spines that stick out along the length of the animal’s proboscis.  It is very unusual for a scientific name to be based on the Welsh language, as traditionally most are derived from Latin or Greek words.  The name Mieridduryn will stand as a lasting tribute to the fossil’s country of origin.

It was decided that the second fossil wasn’t well enough preserved to be able to name it as either belonging to the same species as the first one, or to a different species. 

What can I do if I find an unusual-looking fossil?

As these fossils show, there are still lots of exciting new things to discover in Wales.  If you find something that looks interesting and you're not sure what it is, our Museum scientists would be happy to try to identify it for you, whether it's a fossil, rock, mineral, animal or plant.  Just send us a photo (with a coin or ruler included for scale) with details of where you found it.  You can contact us via our website or on Twitter @CardiffCurator.  We also have a number of spotters’ guides on our website, which will help you identify a lot of the more common things you’re likely to come across.