Rural Museums Network

The Spring 2023 Rural Voices Seminar Series concluded with the opportunity to explore how rural museums can better represent D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people in our museums and using our collections.

Karen Sayer, Professor at Leeds Trinity University presented on the topic of ‘Listening to Livestock: A reflection on rural museums’ support for disability historical research’. This presentation reflected on the sensory histories associated with livestock management. Focusing on hearing and hearing loss, coupled with objects and sources from museums and archives in the network, Karen questioned how we might discover the history of disability in rural museums.

Emily Goff, Project Manager at Curating 4 Change noted that Arts Council England statistics show that only about 6% of those working in the arts are disabled, despite forming 21% of the working age population. She stated that underrepresentation of D/ deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people in our museums isn’t just a problem for disabled people, but for the museum and heritage sector as a whole. As well as hindering authentic disability stories with insights from the inside, it also makes it more difficult for museums – even if committed to access – to properly understand practical barriers for its visitors. Emily discussed why we need to tackle the recruitment problem, and how to enable and retain a more diverse work force, essential for museums to remain relevant for themselves and their communities.

In the resulting discussions resources created by Curating for Change on the Equity of Recruitment were highlighted, and – on the topic of historic terms for D/ deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people which could be found within museum object descriptions – the Buried in the Footnotes project was referenced.

This session was hosted by David Rounce, Project Director with Glencoe Folk Museum with guest speakers Emily Goff and Professor Karen Sayer.

Emily Goff is Project Manager for Curating for Change, the ground-breaking 3-year National Lottery Heritage Funded programme tackling the underrepresentation of D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people in our museums.

Emily is an experienced volunteer manager, museum educator and qualified primary school teacher who has worked for a range of independent, national and university museums and collections over her 12-year career.

Professor Karen Sayer is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Co-Dir of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University and a Senior Fellow of the HEA. Her research focus is on the rural, that is conceptualisations of rural communities, landscapes and environments; human and animal relations in agricultural work and on the farm; labour in field, farm and home; the interior spaces of farmhouse and cottage, as represented, worked and lived.

Reading the material culture of objects held by the Thackray Medical museum, Leeds, she has collaborated on Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss, 1830-1950 (Palgrave, 2017) with Prof Graeme Gooday, Professor of the History of Science and Technology, at the University of Leeds. This addresses the circulation of knowledges about adult ‘deafness’ in the Victorian period and twentieth-century Britain until just after the First World War, and seeks to recover the histories of those who experience hearing loss through the histories of those technologies supposed to ‘correct’ it.

David Rounce is Project Director with Glencoe Folk Museum. He has worked in curatorial roles for thirteen years in a number of independent museums, most recently managing the award-winning rebuilding of Ravenglass Railway Museum in Cumbria.

David has particular interests in rural and industrial history, as well as a passion for curatorial work and thrives on the infinite variety of a career in the heritage sector. @RounceDavid and orphaned-objects.blogspot.com

The Spring 2023 Rural Voices Seminar Series continued with a thought-provoking session exploring rural crafts, some of which are becoming endangered, and consequently being added to the Heritage Crafts Red List.

Heritage Crafts is the national charity for traditional crafts skills and the only UNESCO-accredited ICH NGO in the UK focusing solely on the domain of traditional craftsmanship. Daniel Carpenter, Executive Director of Heritage Crafts, and Greta Bertram, Curator at the Crafts Study Centre, outlined the work of the organisation and the way in which it has partnered with museums to raise awareness of Intangible Cultural Heritage, as well as the challenges museums face in incorporating ICH into their offering in a way that actively supports the continuation of embodied craft knowledge, skills and practices.

Other useful resources that were shared included the online exhibition which grew out of the Stakeholders project, developed by The Museum of English Rural Life on the topic of basketmaking. This saw the museum working with The Basketmakers’ Association. The Museum of English Rural Life has also created a toolkit to enable other organisations to make their own museum of the intangible.

The recently-launched global campaign Wiki Loves Living Heritage was also referenced, as was some important ongoing work to gather information on Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, Showmen and Boater Crafts of Cultural Significance to be added to the Red List of Endangered Crafts in 2023.

This session was hosted by Dr Ollie Douglas, Curator at The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading with guest speakers Daniel Carpenter and Greta Bertram.

Daniel Carpenter has worked in the arts, crafts and heritage sectors for over 15 years. He was one of the founders of Heritage Crafts back in 2009 when he was working for Creative Lives (formerly Voluntary Arts) which exists to promote active participation in everyday creativity. He led Heritage Crafts’ Pre-Apprenticeship Pilot project in West Somerset in 2017, and was commissioned in 2018 to lead the research on the second edition of Red List of Endangered Crafts, before being recruited onto the staff team in 2019. He is a Trustee of Arts&Heritage and an Ambassador of The Fathom Trust.

Greta Bertram joined the Crafts Study Centre in 2017. Previous roles have included work on a variety of cataloguing and research projects at the University of Hertfordshire, the Polar Museum, University of Cambridge, and The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.

She was a Trustee of the Heritage Crafts Association 2011–2018, during which time she conducted a major piece of research into the current state of traditional crafts in the UK to produce the ‘Red List of Endangered Crafts’. Her research interests include craft, especially basketry, intangible heritage, and the role of museums in supporting the transmission of craft and other skills.

Dr Ollie Douglas has worked at The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, for over a decade where his role focusses on curation, interpretation, management, research access, and public engagement. During this time, he has both led and participated in numerous projects that have sought to reimagine rural heritage and museums in a range of creative ways. He sits on the Committee of the RMN and the Folklore Society. He is a previous President of the ICOM-affiliated International Association of Agricultural Museums. @OllieDouglas

To kick off the Spring 2023 Rural Voices Seminar Series, we were delighted to be joined by a fascinating panel of speakers to explore the topic of dialect.

The Dialect and Heritage Project is a national project based on a partnership between the University of Leeds and five member museums of the Rural Museums Network. Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the team had been taking dialect and heritage resources out of the archive and putting them back into the local communities where they truly belong.

At the same time, they had encouraged members of the public to share their present-day dialect with them. The project has tapped into massive public appetite for sharing dialect leading to huge media coverage.

In this session, participants were introduced to the rich dialect archives held at the University of Leeds, shown what the project has been up to and how we could all access the resources. It was great to also hear from museum partners about what they have got out of participating, and there were plenty of ideas and suggestions on where the team might head next.

The team at The Dales Countryside Museum also shared information on their Voices from the Dales podcast which is certainly worth a listen!

This session was hosted by Lisa Harris of the Food Museum, and speakers included Dr Fiona Douglas from the University of Leeds, Poppy Oldham and Fiona Rosher from Dales Countryside Museum, and Laura Kloss and Kate Knowlden from the Food Museum.

Lisa Harris is Collections and Interpretation Manager at the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk. She joined the museum in 2001 and has responsibility for c.40,000 objects, ranging from homewares to working steam traction engines.

She is currently leading the restoration of Alton Watermill to enable the story of ’seed to sandwich’ to be demonstrated (and tasted!) at the museum. Lisa studied History of Art at Stoke on Trent, and Museum Studies at Leicester. She has also worked at Ipswich Museums Service and Gainsborough’s House. @LisaMuseum

Dr Fiona Douglas is Associate Professor in English Language, University of Leeds and Project Lead for the Dialect and Heritage Project. She researches dialects of English (in England and Scotland) and the link between language and identity with a primary interest in dialect words and how they contribute to a sense of belonging.

Fiona Rosher works for the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority as Museum Manager of the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes. She has been in the museum profession since 1990, her first post being at the Yorkshire Dales Mining Museum. In 1993 Fiona was appointed to the newly created role of District Museum Officer for Richmondshire and Hambleton. She worked across two districts providing advice and support for independent and military museums. The enjoyment she found in working within a rural area led to her move in 1996 to the role of Curator at the Dales Countryside Museum. The Museum was at a point of significant change and Fiona has been involved in several major NHLF building, display and community engagement projects. Together with the DCM team she has introduced an events and temporary exhibitions programme and established a learning and engagement offer. She is keen to work in partnership with others to enable the Museum service to grow and to share the stories of the Dales in different ways, for different audiences. The partnership with Leeds University is a long standing one that has brought many mutual benefits.

Laura Kloss is the Learning Manager at the Food Museum and was one of the Engagement Officers for the Dialect and Heritage Project. She has a background in collaborative multi-media projects with young people in the museums and cultural sector formerly working for Chocolate Films, BAFTA, Curzon Cinemas, British Library, Imperial War Museum and Flatpack Film Festival.

Laura is also the founder of Lightbox Cinema producing events for young people which explore cinema heritage.

Kate Knowlden is the Curator at the Food Museum. She joined the museum in 2019 taking on the Search for the Stars digitisation project, managing 500+ volunteers to create an online catalogue of the museum’s 40,000 objects. She helps with the programme of temporary exhibitions and projects and took the museum on the road in 2022 as part of working in partnership with the University of Leeds and their Dialect and Heritage project. Kate studied Photography at the University of Brighton and then a Masters in Curation at Norwich University of the Arts.

A lively discussion and information sharing session ensued as we welcomed George Monger ACR to discuss conservation problems facing rural museums across the UK in the December 2022 Rural Voices Seminar.

Rural Museums Network members and guests were asked to share any conservation conundrums they had, such as the aim to create a maintenance checklist for a working vehicle or a proposed project to restore an item of farm equipment with which they didn’t know where to start.

George shared his extensive experience and reassured those present that they weren’t alone in being uncertain of the best way to proceed with cleaning items that had been donated after years (and years…) of storage within a barn.

Given some of the particular features of rural museum collections (such as often having to devise a way to protect a large object that’s just too big to fit inside, to pests eating our collections or the historic paint colours of farm machinery) we soon realised that no query was too big or too small, and many participants shared the same conundrums.

As a result, the Rural Museums Network will be looking to work with George to create (and answer) some FAQs pertinent to those working with rural life collections. Watch this space for more information!

This seminar was hosted by Rachael Thomas, Secretary of the Rural Museums Network

George Monger Bsc. MA FMA FIIC ACR is an Accredited Conservator (ACR) by the Institute for Conservation (ICON) with over forty-five years’ experience working with national and local history museums, beginning at the Museum Of Mankind (British Museum) and then at the Museum of East Anglian Life (now Food Museum) before becoming freelance for the last twenty-seven years, specialising in Social and Industrial History, Maritime and Ethnological conservation. He has worked with both traditional and modern materials and is often commissioned to undertake work on unusual and difficult objects. George Monger: Conservation & Museum Services is included on the ICON Conservation Register and is also listed as a consultant to carry out Collection Care Assessments for the AIM/ICON Pilgrims Trust funded programme.

Rachael Thomas is a museum curator and conservator, based in Inverness, who has worked with collections across the Highlands of Scotland. Most recently this has included time as Assistant Curator at Auchindrain Township in Argyll, and as Project Conservator during Gairloch Museum’s award-winning reinterpretation. Her areas of interest include the material culture of Scotland’s Gypsy/Travellers, and the interior decorations, fixtures and fittings of Scotland’s vernacular buildings. She is secretary of the Rural Museums Network. @rachaelthomasconservation

Rural communities – and their museums – face particular social, environmental and economic challenges. These are often ‘lost’ in museum-sector discussion, which often speaks from an urban/city perspective, but does not reflect the realities of rural museums, people or communities.

In November 2022, as part of the autumn Rural Voices seminar series, we welcomed Henry McGhie, founder of the museum and heritage consultancy Curating Tomorrow to explore sustainable development ideas and how rural museums can contribute towards sustainable communities, drawing on the ecomuseum model of a museum as ‘a community-led heritage or museum project that supports sustainable development’.

At the heart of this discussion were the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which are available to view on the United Nations website.

This session was recorded and is available to view on the Rural Museums Network YouTube Channel here>>

This seminar was hosted by Hannah Jackson, Treasurer of the Rural Museums Network.

Henry McGhie grew up in the north of Scotland. He has a background as an ecologist, museum curator and manager. He set up Curating Tomorrow in 2019 to support museums to contribute to sustainable development agendas, including the SDGs, climate action, human rights, biodiversity conservation and Disaster Risk Reduction. He is a member of the ICOM Sustainability Working Group, and works internationally to support museums to build futures where people and nature flourish together. He has written a book on the history of natural history, co-edited two books on climate change communication, and produces a series of freely available guides on museums and sustainable development topics.

Hannah Jackson is an experienced museum project manager, having originally joined Norfolk Museums Service (NMS) in 2006 to manage the redevelopment of Lynn Museum. She subsequently held a number of roles at NMS’s 50-acre rural site: Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse. These included positions focused on environmental sustainability (working in partnership with other rural museums within the eastern region), business development, and events and visitor programming.

Hannah is currently on a secondment from her role as Operations Manager for NMS’s western area museums (Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, Lynn Museum and Ancient House Museum of Thetford Life) to project manage the transformation of Norwich Castle as part of the Royal Palace Reborn project.

Tracing the history of the longhouse in Scotland from the earliest examples through to survivors today, we were delighted to welcome Niall Logan to our October 2022 Rural Voices Seminar to explore how such structures were built, how they functioned, and why there are so few surviving.

This session was recorded and is available to view on the Rural Museums Network YouTube Channel here>>

This session was hosted by Sharon Martin, Head of Collections and Visitor Services at Auchindrain Historic Township in Argyll, Scotland.

Niall Logan held a personal chair in Systematic Bacteriology at Glasgow Caledonian University, and in 2017 was awarded the international Bergey Medal in recognition of outstanding and life-long contributions to the field of bacterial classification and identification. Although it did not become his career, his first love was archaeology, and he has now found his way back to it. A keen amateur of vernacular architecture, he has single-handedly restored his 18th-century farmhouse over 40 years, is Chairman of the Scottish Vernacular Buildings Working Group, and a trustee of the Auchindrain Township near Inveraray. In 2013 he co-founded the Baldernock Local History Group, and devotes much of his time to landscape archaeology and archive study, from the post-medieval onwards.

Sharon Martin is Head of Collections and Visitor Services at Auchindrain Historic Township in Argyll, Scotland, where she has worked for the past twelve years. Her role is diverse, and covers collections management and development, learning, the visitor experience, operational management, HR, and the organisation of staff BBQs. Sharon is currently Chair of the Rural Museums Network.

Gypsies are England’s oldest minority: marginalised but never invisible. That’s a challenge for museum displays, because although non-Gypsies have been representing the Romany for centuries, this was very different from the way that people in the community portray themselves. The outside view treats Gypsies as anonymous stock figures in a landscape, through paintings and literature: Gypsy memory is close-up, personal, and relies on traditions like storytelling and song which do not translate easily into the museum environment. Gypsy archives are oral and disconnected. Non-Gypsy archives are abundant but hostile.

So what is a curator to do?

For our May 2022 Rural Voices Seminar Series, we welcomed Jeremy Harte to share the kind of material likely to appear in local collections – postcards, village reminiscences, crafts – to see how they can be pulled out of anonymity into memory with the support of the community. A Traveller presence in museums is welcomed as validation for communities more often talked about than talking. 

This session was recorded and is available to view on the Rural Museums Network YouTube Channel here>>

This session was hosted by Rachael Thomas, curator and conservator, based in Inverness.

Jeremy Harte is curator of Bourne Hall Museum at Epsom and Ewell, where he has been researching and presenting Gypsy history for twenty years. He is co-organiser of Roma Gypsy Traveller History Month in Surrey, sits on the committee of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society, and has worked with community leaders to create the Surrey Gypsy Archive. He worked on the international Roma Routes project collating Romany material culture in museums. His history Travellers Through Time is the fruit of a project to present an honest portrait of Gypsy history from the inside. He can be found on Epsom Downs each June, enthusiastically buying whatever everyone else is buying. @FolkLoreSociety

Rachael Thomas is a museum curator and conservator, based in Inverness, who has worked with collections across the Highlands of Scotland. Most recently this has included time as Assistant Curator at Auchindrain Township in Argyll, and as Project Conservator during Gairloch Museum’s award-winning reinterpretation. Her areas of interest include the material culture of Scotland’s Gypsy/Travellers, and the interior decorations, fixtures and fittings of Scotland’s vernacular buildings. She is secretary of the Rural Museums Network. @rachaelthomasconservation

For most of us, our work would not be possible without brilliant volunteers. They tend to plants and plots, muck out stables, provide hands-on opportunities with collections, welcome visitors, research and catalogue collections, and support and sustain almost every aspect of our work. From March 2020, many of us were forced to find new digital ways to share our collections and activity. But where did this leave our amazing volunteers? What part could they play in this new online world?

For our April 2022 Rural Voices Seminar Series, we were delighted to host a session to share exciting and successful collections-centred projects that have virtual volunteering at their heart.

Digging deep discussions focused on two case studies; one that began pre-pandemic and another that emerged after the first lockdown. Participants were encouraged who were keen to try something similar, or wanted to reach beyond their local volunteer base. Questions were posed as to how we might overcome the barriers that such technologies can present, what the simplest, most affordable solutions might be, and if there were ways that rural museums could help and support each other.

This session was hosted by Dr Ollie Douglas, Curator at The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.

Sheila Fisher manages the volunteering programmes for a pool of 200 volunteers across Reading Museum and The Museum of English Rural Life. In the past two years, she co-developed seven new digital volunteering roles for 54 volunteers who donated over 1,300 hours. The roles include research into art works and artists; detective work about buildings and supporting the creation of school resources in a conservation area; summarising memoirs; transcribing letters; and research into object collections for digital interpretation and for conversion to Wikipedia articles. @SheilaHenFisher

Lisa Harris is Collections and Interpretation Manager at the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk. She joined the museum in 2001 and has responsibility for c.40,000 objects, ranging from homewares to working steam traction engines. She is currently leading the restoration of Alton Watermill to enable the story of ’seed to sandwich’ to be demonstrated (and tasted!) at the museum. Lisa studied History of Art at Stoke on Trent, and Museum Studies at Leicester. She has also worked at Ipswich Museums Service and Gainsborough’s House. @LisaMuseum

Tim Jerrome is an archivist and researcher who has been working on a project named ‘Building Connections’. This project worked to create online content for the MERL website, particularly relating to underrepresented communities, and also focused on digital interpretation of The MERL’s galleries. This digital interpretation was undertaken with the help of a large team of remote volunteers.

Kate Knowlden is Curator at the Food Museum. She joined the museum in 2019 taking on the Search for the Stars digitisation project, managing 500+ volunteers to create an online catalogue of the museum’s 40,000 objects. She helps with the programme of temporary exhibitions as well as working in partnership with the University of Leeds and their Dialect and Heritage project to take the collection on the road to rural East Anglia in 2022. Kate studied Photography at the University of Brighton and then a Masters in Curation at Norwich University of the Arts. @KateFKnowlden

Nicola Minney has spent the last 18 months working with The MERL collections, as part of the ‘Building Connections’ Project. Throughout the project she has produced new interpretation on themes of migration, decolonisation, and LGBTQ+ stories, including ‘Queer Constellations’ and a popular blog series called ‘Changing Perspectives’.

This project was supported by a large team of volunteers who participated in the MERL’s first ever digital volunteering programme, to great effect. @NM269

Dr Ollie Douglas has worked at The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, for over a decade where his role focusses on curation, interpretation, management, research access, and public engagement. During this time, he has both led and participated in numerous projects that have sought to reimagine rural heritage and museums in a range of creative ways. He sits on the Committee of the RMN and the Folklore Society. He is a previous President of the ICOM-affiliated International Association of Agricultural Museums. @OllieDouglas

In March 2022, we were delighted to welcome Norena Shopland back to the Rural Museums Network to build upon some of the discussions begun during our Telling the Stories of Rural LGBTQ+ Lives seminar.

Norena explored in depth how rural museums can utilise her research to showcase a new reading of the local landscape. Working-class, and rural people have rarely been written about in history. When they are, it is often for sensational reasons, an arrest, an accident or death, or doing something that defied social conventions. Consequently, these stories are often seen in a negative light and avoided. Museums rarely include them, but it does not have to be this way. With limited knowledge and resources, small museums can take small stories and make an exhibition, a blog, an ebooklet, that will fascinate everyone.

Norena’s presentation used real accounts from historical sources and showed that, by applying intersectionality, we can gain new skills in not only locating stories in historic material but getting maximum value from them. No story is too small.

Norena’s book, A Practical Guide to Searching LGBTQIA Historical Records is published by Routledge, 2020.

The Queering Glamorgan research guide to sources for the study of LGBT History, mentioned by Norena during the seminar, is available as a downloadable PDF from the Glamorgan Archives.

This session was hosted by David Rounce, Project Director with Glencoe Folk Museum.

Norena Shopland is an author/historian specialising in the history of sexual orientation and gender identity. Her book Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales (Seren Books, 2017) is the first completely historical work on Welsh LGBTQ+ history. Queering Glamorgan and A Practical Guide to Searching LGBTQIA Historical Records (Routledge, 2020) have become very popular as toolkits to aid people in doing research. Shopland also researches and writes on Welsh history including her book The Curious Case of the Eisteddfod Baton and an exhibition and forthcoming book on the Tip Girls of Wales, women working in the coal industry. In 2021 Shopland was commissioned by the Welsh Government to deliver LGBTQ+ training to local libraries, museums, and archives in Wales. Her latest book is A History of Women in Men’s Clothes: from cross-dressing to empowerment (Pen and Sword Books, 2021). @NorenaShopland

David Rounce is Project Director with Glencoe Folk Museum and still pinches himself that he’s paid to build museums. A graduate of the University of York with BA (hons) History/Archaeology and MA Transport History, he has worked in curatorial roles for twelve years in a number of independent museums, most recently managing the award-winning rebuilding of Ravenglass Railway Museum in Cumbria. Away from work David’s hobbies include playwriting, photography, and talking about himself in the third person. @RounceDavid and orphaned-objects.blogspot.com

We’re delighted to share news from our friends at AIMA, the International Association of Agricultural Museums.

In 2021, AIMA President Claus Kropp co-ordinated an international, digital conference which saw participants from all over the world discussing the history, preservation, training and future of draught animals. The proceedings of the conference are a comprehensive result of these efforts.

For thousands of years, draught animals played a key role in the survival of many cultures. Even today, they secure the livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. Whether in transport, agriculture or forestry, draught animals can provide sustainable, environmentally friendly and economically valuable forms of land use. Nevertheless, there are many challenges, be it the pressure of profit-oriented markets or politics, in the field of animal welfare, breeding and livestock farming. In addition, the total number of draught animals is declining.

You can download Draft Animals in the Past, Present and Future here>>