Sun prints! They are such fun to make and really beautiful too. We'll be making some on the 3rd July at our new art club

Well, it's all been happening in the last few weeks!  

As you know from the last post, we lost one of the four original chicks around 23 May. On Saturday 29 May it was a rainy day and so we limited the event to the Museum. Then, at about 12.20 a lady rushed into the Museum to say that some people outside near City Hall had found a chick on the pavement and were "kicking" it to make it fly off. James and I rushed outside to see what was going on and there was a chick on the road, surrounded by people. It obviously had jumped the nest a bit too early, as it couldn't fly yet.  

So we contacted Adrian Williams, local falconer who we're consulting with, who came down to check it over. He said it was fine, just a bit underweight. James and Adrian took the chick back to City Hall roof where the chick was placed just under the clock tower. By the bank holiday Monday, the bird had made it back onto the tower, but not to the nest. 

In the week or two after we have only ever seen two juvenile birds at one time, so it looks as if the third one did not get enough food from its parents and was out-competed by its siblings. Sad news. 

However, the remaining two are now flying! They're coming up against their own challenges as the gulls try to mob them as they practice their flying skills, but it doesn't seem to be deterring them from making significant progress. They're beginning to look quite adept, so do come down and see us soon, as we'll be seeing some aerial acrobatics as the young birds get taught their hunting skills by the adults.  

Sarah Lewis

A medieval Latin service will be held at St Teilo's Church next week.
Numbers are very limited so let me start off by encouraging anyone interested in attending to ring our education booking office on (029) 20 57 3424 to reserve a place. It will take place on the 24th of June, at 11.00.

It will be the first Latin service to take place in St Teilo's Church since it was moved 50 miles down the M4, from near Pontarddulais, to the Museum. Part of a wider conference exploring worship in the Middle Ages, the service will be open to the public, but booking is absolutely essential. The conference is a meeting of experts from around the world, who study the nitty-gritty of everyday life, Latin texts, architecture, archaeology and visual history, to build a fuller picture of what life was like over 500 years ago. We will be testing their theories out, and you are welcome to come and help us!

In a way, the performance will help us at the museum to see whether our reconstruction of the Church - a lengthy process of research, archaeology and good ol' Vitamin Compromise - is right. We'll also be able to help researchers to see whether current theories about the performance of liturgy actually work when you try them out. We've yet to find a real Tudor priest we can phone to check these things out: so the only way to learn, really, is by trial and error. That's until I find a flux capacitor in the collection somewhere, obviously.

Over the last fortnight we've been working on the roof and it's almost finished. We've used seven bails of reed to thatch the roof, each bail contains between 80-100 bundles of reed. As you can see we've gone through quite a lot!

Take a look at photographs. You can see the bundles being placed in between the hazel rod purlins before Dafydd uses a wooden paddle to beat the roof into shape.