10-80

 

After a long silence we look to the future.

 

 

The Old Medicine House

3^rd December 2014

3^rd December 2014 was the 10^th anniversary of the founding of The Blackden Trust.

 

In October 2014 Alan Garner turned 80.   

 

10 years and 80 years: 10-80

 

We shall be celebrating this serendipitous conjunction in 2015.   10-80 will be a special season of funding and fun.  We shall be fund-raising for our planned future expansion and having fun to mark the combined anniversaries.  There will be some one-off activities and some goods in the shop that will be unique to the season.  We shall also add extra features to our established events. 

 

One of the special activities is a competition in two parts.  The first part is to identify 10 photographs of objects in The Blackden Trust’s collections and displays.  These will appear once a month on our website and on our Facebook and Twitter pages.  All the answers can be found in the display cabinets at The Old Medicine House.  

 

Here is a taster.



 

What can it be?

 

The second part of the competition is to identify the location of 8 photographs of a place; one place for each decade of Alan Garner’s life.  Each place is associated with one of his novels.  The challenge is to match the place to the novel. These photographs will appear once a month, starting in January 2015, when we shall be giving details of how to enter the competition.

The prize will be a signed copy of one of Alan Garner’s books.   And there are not many of those about!



 

The Owl Service

This week we scanned book covers  for The Blackden Trust website, where the Trust is planning to sell books online.  Among the books on sale will be one of our childhood favourites: The Owl Service.

Here's the beautiful dish that inspired the book - the real Owl Service. The decoration round the edge seems to be floral, though some people clearly see owls' eyes staring up at them.

So what happens if you put the "owl" motifs together?



A complete owl, with wings and a body.

More next week,

Bethan and Phil



A Place of Making

Fifty five years ago at 11 o’clock in the morning of 7^th of June 1957 Alan Garner turned the key in the lock of the ‘cottage’ at Blackden for the first time.  His memory of that day:

The doorknocker was, and still is, a brass replica of the Lincoln Imp.  I had marked it as a favourable omen at first sight, but now there was no need for me to use it, because I held the key.  I opened the door.

For the first and last time I saw the house untouched by habitation and could appreciate the size of the rooms and the scale of the timbering.  If I’d had any doubts they would have been dispelled.  Here was something ancient and big.  The smells were of oak and lime and thatch and wood smoke, a permanent ambience, touched briefly by the fading odours of floor swabbing and disinfectant.

I carried in my maternal great-grandmother’s chair, a part of her trousseau.  My cousin helped me manoeuvre our paternal grandfather’s table over the threshold.  Another story had begun.

Alan Garner

The cottage was in fact half of a medieval hall that had been divided into two cottages some time in the 1880s.  The tenant of the other cottage was Betty Carter, the daughter of the first tenant. 

Between Betty’s mother and Alan the occupants of the two dwellings had been agricultural labourers, servants, laundry women, signalmen, house painters and teachers.  Alan, the son of a house painter himself, is the first writer to be nurtured by Blackden.  The second is his daughter, Elizabeth. 

Here is Alan in 1960, the year of the publication of his first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.  This patch of Blackden is where he works and where he has written all his novels. 

And The Blackden Trust continues the creating and making with our visitors.

Cherry Tree Felling

This cherry tree was a sapling when Alan Garner found Toad Hall in 1957.  Every year since, its blossom has been a glorious affirmation of spring, but last year one branch was less glorious than the other and we feared that it might have died.  We had to wait until the tree blossomed this year to be certain.  There was no doubt about it.  One branch was dangerously dead.  It had to be felled.

The tree surgeons worked with skill and balletic grace ...

... bringing down the branch safely …

... leaving a neat pile of cherry wood.