Save the date! 2019 Annual Seminar & AGM

Save the date! The annual seminar of the Rural Museums Network will take place on Sunday 6th and Monday 7th October 2019 at Beamish, the Living Museum of the North in County Durham.

Join us on Sunday 6th October and experience Beamish’s ‘Power from the Past’ event. This is a great chance to see the museum’s impressive collection of steam and road transport in action, as well as some visiting vehicles.

Meet the Beamish team and fellow Rural Museums Network members to find out more about Beamish’s working collections and events programme. Power from the Past runs from 10am to 5pm.

For those staying locally, on Sunday evening there will be the chance to meet more RMN members for an informal dinner or drinks.

On Monday 7th October, we’ll continue the discussions. A brief AGM will be followed by a day of seminars and tours exploring new developments at Beamish. During the day there will be the chance to discuss the impact of this work and lessons learned with the wider project team.

We very much hope that you’ll be able to join us for one or both days. Further information will be available in the next few weeks, together with details on how to book. In the meantime, please do save the date!

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Understanding Rural Networks – Freelance project opportunity

The Rural Museums Network (RMN) is delighted to have been awarded funding from Arts Council England’s Subject Specialist Network Fund to deliver the ‘Understanding Rural Networks’ project.

RMN is seeking to engage a freelance worker to help deliver a programme of regional-wide events that help non-specialist curators and general managers of heritage sites looking after rural and agricultural collections to develop, maintain and share expertise associated with these specialist collections, and also to celebrate their contribution to public engagement, education and enjoyment by providing ways of interpreting these collections more effectively through better use of objects and more engaging story-telling.

The ideal candidate will have experience in planning, administering and delivering events and activities, have experience of working in the cultural or heritage sector, and should be experienced in evaluating projects and writing reports.

Details

Project Support Worker,  Rural Museums Network

Job Type: Contract

Contract Type: Freelance, 20 days (maximum)

Fee: £4,000 (maximum)

Project timeline: April 2019 – March 2020

Tasks

  • To organise 10 regional events.  This will include:
    • Booking venues
    • managing catering arrangements
    • booking speakers and facilitators
    • marketing events
    • administering a travel bursary scheme
    • ensuring necessary resources are available at venues
  • To provide information on where collections, knowledge and expertise can be found.
  • To produce a draft report on location of collections and collections expertise
  • To produce a map of where collections are located.
  • To collect evidence to support final project evaluation

How to apply

  • Submit your CV and portfolio to chris.copp@staffordshire.gov.uk
  • All applications must be submitted by 9am, Monday 15th April 2019.
  • Candidates will be shortlisted and there will be a telephone interview.  Criteria for shortlisting will be based on relevant experience, quality and price.
  • Interviews will take place w/c  15th April 2019

We look forward to hearing from you.

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Call for Papers – CIMA: Past and Future Agricultures

The Museum of English Rural Life, Reading.

The Museum of English Rural Life will host the Congress of AIMA in July 2020.

From 20 to 23 July 2020 the Museum of English Rural Life will play host to the Congress of the International Association of Agricultural Museums, AIMA.

Please consider submitting a proposal and feel free to share this information far and wide. It would be great to have a good representative body of content from members of the Rural Museums Network at the 2020 Congress.

The Rural Museums Network Committee are also aiming to organise and co-host some elements of the programme, perhaps in the form of a workshop / sharing session intended to cater for museum professionals who aren’t agriculture experts but who might wish to benefit from expertise of the farming museum community. The format of this Rural Museums Network contribution is yet to be finalised but watch this space for more details.

Bookings for the Congress are set to open later this year once a provisional programme is in place. Details will be circulated closer to the time. Suffice to say that we hope as many Rural Museums Network members as possible will be keen to attend and participate in what we hope will be a useful event for all of us.

AIMA is an ICOM-Affiliate and an international network that we believe will grow to serve our agricultural museum sector well in years to come.

For more information on the call for papers, please visit the AIMA website here>>

Closing date for proposals: 28 June 2019

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Book now for the 2018 Annual Seminar!

Book now to join us for the annual seminar of the Rural Museums Network.
Sunday 30 September and Monday 1 October 2018
Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, Norfolk

Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse (part of Norfolk Museums Service) incorporates a museum of life on the land, traditional working farm, historic workhouse and beautiful grounds. The Museum has recently re-launched its workhouse galleries following a major £1.8million redevelopment supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The new displays include evocative workhouse settings, where visitors can stand face to face with projections of staff and inmates and listen to first hand stories, often tragic, sometimes inspirational, from the people who once walked those whitewashed corridors. The workhouse is put into context with accompanying new galleries which explore stories of Norfolk life.

Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse: the Museum of Norfolk Life

Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse –
the venue for this year’s Rural Museums Network annual Seminar

For those able to join us, there will be the opportunity to experience the museum’s annual Horse Power! Event on Sunday 30 September. This celebration of the work of heavy horses will focus on Gressenhall’s traditional farm.

The main business will be conducted on Monday 1 October and will comprise a brief AGM, followed by an extended tour of the new galleries at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse. A full timetable can be found below.

We very much hope that members will be able to join us for one or both days. For more information or to book, please click here to contact us>>

Sunday 30 September
10.00 onwards – arrival for Horse Power! The event runs from 10am to 5pm, and members are welcome as guests of the museum throughout the day.

3pm – optional opportunity to network with fellow RMN members at the Mardlers’ Rest Café.

Evening – optional self-funded meal in a local venue for those staying overnight in Dereham

Monday 1 October
10.30am –Arrival and coffee

11.00am – Welcome and AGM

11.30am – Learning at Gressenhall – an insight into the museum and its formal learning programme for schools (Jan Pitman, Learning Manager)

12noon – RMN Development Study Update (Sally Ackroyd)

12.15pm – Lunch (provided)

1.00pm – Gressenhall and Voices from the Workhouse (Robin Hanley, Assistant Head of Norfolk Museum Service)

1.30pm – Tour of Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse – Hannah Jackson (Operations Manager), Megan Dennis (Curator), Wayne Kett (Collections Development Officer) and Richard Dalton (Farm Officer) will lead delegates on a tour of museum, the Norfolk Collections Centre large object store and farm, offering an onsite overview of the recent changes and how lessons learned from the project are being incorporated into forthcoming work across the 50 acre site.

4.00pm – Closing remarks

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Save the date for the 2018 Annual Seminar

Suffolk Punch heavy horses working at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, Norfolk

Horse Power at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse

Save the date!  The annual seminar of the Rural Museums Network will take place on Sunday 30 September and Monday 1 October 2018 at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse in Norfolk.

Join us on Sunday 30 September and experience the museum’s annual Horse Power! event.  This celebration of the work of heavy horses will focus on Gressenhall’s traditional farm.  Watch as the museum’s Suffolk Punch horses are joined by visiting teams to carry out seasonal tasks, talk to those who work with these impressive animals and explore all that the 50-acre site has to offer.

Meet the Gressenhall team and fellow Rural Museums Network members to find out more about Gressenhall’s engaging events programme.  Horse Power! runs from 10am to 5pm.

For those staying locally, on Sunday evening there will be the chance to meet more RMN members for an informal dinner or drinks.

On Monday 1 October, we’ll continue the discussions.  A brief AGM will be followed by a day of seminars and tours exploring the new displays.  Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse has recently relaunched following a major £1.8million redevelopment of its Workhouse and Museum of Norfolk Life galleries, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.  During the day there will be the chance to discuss the impact of this work and lessons learned with the wider project team.

We very much hope that members will be able to join us for one or both days.  For more information, please click here to contact us>> 

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Your guide to interpreting carriages

As part of Staffordshire Archives & Heritage’s Arts Council Resilience funded ‘Moving On’ project, a new ‘Guide to Interpreting Carriages’ has been produced. It is available as a free download at www.staffordshirecarriages.org.uk

Horse-drawn carriages are found in museum collections across the country. As moving objects in static displays they are often difficult to interpret.

This guide, funded by Arts Council England, brings together best practice in the interpretation of carriages to help museums bring them to life. It was commissioned by Staffordshire Archives and Heritage and written by museum interpretation consultant Steve Slack, in collaboration with professionals from across the museum sector working with carriage collections.

ACE funding has also enabled the team to digitise Staffordshire County Museum’s nationally important collection of horse-drawn carriages, carts and sleighs and make them available online. The Staffordshire Carriages website features 3D imaging that you can rotate and zoom in to explore detail.

The Staffordshire Carriages website features 3D imaging that you can rotate and zoom in to explore detail, including this luxury Barouche.

The Staffordshire Carriages website features 3D imaging that you can rotate and zoom in to explore detail, including this luxury Barouche.

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Rural Museums Network Development Study vacancy

On this post you find attached an advert for a consultant/worker to undertake a primarily desk-based review of RMN’s current activities and make recommendations regarding our future development. This work is being commissioned following discussion by the RMN committee and the detailed brief was developed by a working group of committee members.

The deadline for submission of Expressions of Interest is 5pm on Monday 7th March 2016.
We hope that the key findings of this study will be shared at our 2016 AGM, taking place on 25-26 May at St Fagans (please reserve these dates in your diary!)

Please click here for the advert.

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Rural Museums Network Annual Conference 2015

Annual Conference 2015

The Preservation and Interpretation of Historic Farm Buildings

 

The Rural Museums Network annual conference for 2015 will be held in Scotland on 20th and 21st May. It is being hosted jointly by Urras Achadh an Droighinn/The Auchindrain Trust and Scotland’s National Museum of Rural Life.

The conference will focus on the preservation and interpretation of historic farm buildings. Many rural life museums occupy buildings originally constructed to house farming activities and processes, or dwellings that meet the needs of people involved in agriculture. Some museums collect examples of such buildings and present them as museum objects, but in general the focus in rural life museums can be on displayed contents or current operational needs. Within a sector where a wide spread of different approaches is both inevitable and desirable, to what extent should the visitor’s attention be drawn to the way a building was designed to support particular activities? What about the materials it was made from or the way in which it was constructed? And does it matter how such buildings are then adapted and maintained to support their new museum use: what are our philosophies?

At a time when traditional farm buildings are increasingly threatened by the impact of changes in agricultural methods, rural life museums will have an increasingly important role as the holders and preservers of the last remaining examples of what was once too common to be worthy of attention.

The first day of the conference will be based at Auchindrain, 75 miles north-west of Glasgow in rural Argyll. The museum preserves the last active survivor and now incomparably the most complete example of what were once thousands of joint-tenancy farm “townships” across Scotland. It is Scotland’s largest group of remaining vernacular rural buildings, and is recognised as a site of national importance. On the second day, the conference will move south (thus, for most of those attending, on the way home) to the National Museum of Rural Life in East Kilbride. At the heart of this lies an 18th and 19th century model farm, Wester Kittochside, which is currently presented as it was in the 1950s. Guided study tours of both sites will provide an opportunity for people to develop an understanding of their nature and different significances, and of the management challenges arising from their new uses as museums for visitors.

A keynote talk will be delivered by Gavin Sprott, who as a senior curator with National Museums Scotland played a leading role in the development of Wester Kittochside Farm into the National Museum of Rural Life, and who is also a long-serving Trustee of Auchindrain.

Please click here to view the schedule of the 2015 conference.

Please click here to download the information and booking form for the conference.

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Settling House settles into new museum home

The restored Counting House at Stowmarket © Museum of East Anglian Life

The Settling House or Counting House from the old cattle market in nearby Bury St Edmunds has been removed, restored and is now on show as an exhibit at the Museum of East Anglian Life at Stowmarket.

Click here for the full story in an article by David Viner. It first appeared in Old Glory, October 2013 page 30, and is reproduced here by kind permission of the editor.

 

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2014 AGM and Conference

Traction engines in the S.E. Davis Collection

The theme for this year’s Conference was larger and working objects in museums.  On Wednesday 14th May we met at the S.E. Davis Collection at Astwood Bank near Redditch. Tim Bryan of the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust, Skills for the Future trainees from Gressenhall and Museum of East Anglian Life, and Hamish Wood from Avoncroft all gave presentations on aspects of their work.  We were then treated by Paul Davis to an introduction and guided tour of the amazing S.E. Davis Collection.

Approaching the inn in style, behind the Marshall traction engine 'Emily' © David Viner

Approaching the inn in style, behind the Marshall traction engine 'Emily' © David Viner

Paul Davis’s enthusiastic and enlightening tour around the 500 or so large objects the family have gathered together at Astwood Bank was rounded off with the chance for a trailer ride behind one of the family’s engines, the Marshall traction engine Emily of 1925, on the way to an enjoyable supper in The Why Not Inn nearby.

 
 
Avoncroft's windmill back to its best © David Viner

Avoncroft's windmill back to its best © David Viner

The next day we met at Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings at Bromsgrove for our AGM. This was followed by presentations by Sally Ackroyd, David Viner and others on the recent work of the Network, and updates from our members. After an introduction to Avoncroft Museum by Simon Carter we were able to explore the site.  Of particular interest was the spectacular recently refurbished windmill that is ‘sailed’ on occasions by a team of volunteers.

Many thanks to the Davis family and all at Avoncroft for their hospitality and a warm welcome, making for a truly memorable meeting.

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