Living in Silk Exhibition, Castle Museum Nottingham.
The oldest inn in England is tucked beneath Nottingham Castle's walls. Rooms are carved from the bedrock - a sprouted seed caught and long ago threw out roots
further along there is a terrace of doors leading underground
guarded by a bronze Robin Hood.
A raised passageway leads to the castle entrance
and up towards the keep
and from there look down from where I'd come
or look south to the distant hills and the oldest rock in the land
lies under Charnwood - a forest once contiguous with Sherwood where
those outlaws hid.
Then, at last, my goal - the city museum and art gallery
- where, to celebrate the handing over of the Olympics from China to the UK there is a special exhibition of silk from the National Silk Museum of China in Hangzhou.
This was a place I managed to miss despite staying there a week in 2009 (a confusion of city on my part) and I was thinking I might go back, but how much easier to find that the museum has come to me. So I stood and gawped for hours at tiny pieces of cloth 5,000 years old and wondered at the sophistication of a people who wove not just stripes but managed tiny patterns in this fabric made from insect spit. And heard too an interesting talk by Dr Mary M Brooks who is a silk conservator at the University of Southampton.
further along there is a terrace of doors leading underground
guarded by a bronze Robin Hood.
A raised passageway leads to the castle entrance
and up towards the keep
and from there look down from where I'd come
or look south to the distant hills and the oldest rock in the land
lies under Charnwood - a forest once contiguous with Sherwood where
those outlaws hid.
Then, at last, my goal - the city museum and art gallery
- where, to celebrate the handing over of the Olympics from China to the UK there is a special exhibition of silk from the National Silk Museum of China in Hangzhou.
This was a place I managed to miss despite staying there a week in 2009 (a confusion of city on my part) and I was thinking I might go back, but how much easier to find that the museum has come to me. So I stood and gawped for hours at tiny pieces of cloth 5,000 years old and wondered at the sophistication of a people who wove not just stripes but managed tiny patterns in this fabric made from insect spit. And heard too an interesting talk by Dr Mary M Brooks who is a silk conservator at the University of Southampton.
posted by Clare Dudman at 9:04 pm
2 Comments:
I love these pictures of Nottingham, particularly of the inn. So is the inn inside the walls or just outside?
Thank you! The inn is just outside. From what I've read a lot of this sort of thing went on in earlier times - people 'borrowing' walls of castles and churches as one side of their own buildings.
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