The Workhouse Museum and Gardens, Ripon

We left the Cathedral (see my last post) and  followed the signs to The Workhouse Museum.

It was a well kept building and the volunteers, nearly all of them dressed in costume were very welcoming. The first part of the building that you enter is the gatehouse.  People arriving here would be admitted and although their circumstances were pretty dire they would at least be washed, clothed and fed and have a roof over their heads. 

This part of the gatehouse building houses the Guardians' meeting room - above.  Some workhouses were better than others, the monies they received were administered by the guardians and some were less scrupulous than others.

The room where people waited to be accepted for admittance to the Workhouse.

Above the day to day rules and regulations of the workhouse.

The bathing area

Clean clothes and regulation wear.

Receiving ward for inmates.

Vagrant's Cells

Vagrants were offered one nights stay and an evening meal in return for a completed task of work which would be designated by the Master or Matron.  Possibly working in the garden or cleaning out the pigs.

Across the yard from the admittance area and overnight cells was the workhouse proper.  The garden in front has recently been restored.

At the front of the building are the living quarters of the Master and Matron who were usually a married couple.

The kitchen where food was prepared for the inmates.  Food like soup, meat pie, suet and rice puddings, porridge and gruel were all on the list provided for the Poor Law Board in 1866.

The volunteer school master waiting for his pupils.  Children were taught the basics in the workhouse.

The doctor waiting for his patients.

The workhouse was pretty self sufficient growing their own fruit and vegetables in the garden and keeping a pig and chickens.

The present gardens were a joy to walk around, they were well tended and looked very productive.

This museum has some very dedicated volunteers both in the building and the garden.

It seems to have been a bumper year for poppies, where ever we travelled we saw lots of them  along the road side verges, in fields and gardens.

Whilst we were in the kitchen we saw this recipe chalked on the wall.  It was a recipe for Wilfra Cakes which were traditionally made in Ripon each year on August 1st which is the saints day of St Wilfred who founded the cathedral we looked at in my last post.  It was made as a treat for the inmates on that day.

" August 1894 - for some years it had been the custom to augment the normal workhouse dinner on St Wilfred's Sunday by the addition of broad beans in parsley sauce; this year the Master and Matron thought something should be done at tea time and one and a half dozen large fruit tarts were served and greatly appreciated."

I saw this book in the Museum shop and bought it as it looked an interesting read (which it was) and also I was hoping it would have some mention of the Wilfra cake inside,  unfortunately it didn't but I looked it up as soon as we got home.

 I then decided I would try the recipe we'd photographed in the museum.  It's just sweet, shortcrust pastry both top and bottom and a mixture of apple, Wenslydale cheese and sugar as a filling.

It was very tasty.

A few days later I bought a copy of Landscape magazine for August.  I usually only treat myself to two or three copies a year as it is quite expensive.  

Imagine my surprise when I found a recipe for Wilfra Apple cake inside as part of an article on seasonal, local and traditional food. 

Link to more on Wilfra Cakes

Link to more on the Ripon Workhouse Museum

Ripon Cathedral

We arrived in Rippon around lunch time so after a scone and coffee at a lovely cafe just down the road opposite - I had a blackberry and apple scone and Paul had a Wenslydale cheese scone - both delicious, we entered the cathedral.

Ripon Cathedral has a history dating back to the 7th century and was founded by St Wilfred in the year 672, it has been rebuilt several times since.  The Saxon Crypt is thought to be the oldest in the country.

The pulpit designed by Henry Wilson in 1913 in a mixture of the  Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau styles.

 

It is made of bronze and stands on marble columns.  The figures are of four Anglo-Saxon Saints, Cuthbert, Etheldreda, Hilda and Chad.  It was rather impressive.

Above the original stone pulpit which used to be on top of the medieval screen below.

The stone screen above dates from the 15th century although the figures are modern, dating from about 1947 and depict local people of Ripon who have been influential both in the town and church.

The Saxon Crypt is all that survives of the original church and it is where relics brought back from Rome by St Wilfred were housed.

View across the nave - There was a large school party being guided around the church so we set off in the opposite direction but by doing this I'm afraid I missed one or two things and didn't get back to them later.

The stairs leading up to the Cathedral's library.

The library is a large, light and airy room built in the 14th century.  It houses many ancient books plus displays of silver communion vessels too.  Also on display is the Ripon Jewel, a gold disc which dates from the time of St Wilfred.  It was found near the cathedral in 1976.

The jewel was quite fascinating.  It is small, about 29mm in diameter.  On the back it is plain gold and on the front it has settings for jewels.  There are pieces of amber still in place but other gems have been lost.  It may have been used as a brooch or as an embellishment for a relic casket.

The Holy Spirit Chapel with metalwork designed in the 1970s by Leslie Durbin who also designed the first £1 coins.

The Font. is part Tudor and the rest Victorian.
 

Two things of note about the cathedral are its literary connections.  The father of Charles Dodgson was a member of the clergy team at the Cathedral in the 1860s.  Charles Dodgson wrote as Lewis Carroll and it is said that the misericord carvings in the Quire influenced his writing of 'Alice in Wonderland.'

The poet Wilfred Owen spent his 25th birthday in March 1918 visiting Ripon Cathedral. Just a few months later he was killed in action at Sambre-Oise Canal in France just days before the end of the war.

Next we'll visit the workhouse and try out a Ripon speciality.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park - Part Two

Continuing with details of our visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture park from my last post about Mister Finch. It has taken me a while to get around to writing this second part as the heat is getting to me, I can't seem to find a cool spot and my brain seems unable to grasp the simplest things.  It has taken me three days in the cooler hours of the early morning to finish it so here goes......

After a quick lunch we set off to see the other exhibitions.  We've visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park a couple of times before and had seen most of the permanent sculptures which are dotted around the parkland so we concentrated on the temporary exhibitions.

In the Georgian chapel was what I thought was a wonderful exhibition -

Beyond Time by Chiharu Shiota.  The installation was made expecially for this space.

It is made from two thousand balls of woollen thread and seems to weave its way quite magically across the extent of the chapel floor and up into the ceiling.

Most of the threads come from the bare piano structure which is set slightly off centre.  I hope the visitor doesn't mind being in my photo which I took from up in the balcony.   I thought she added scale and her face is hidden by the pretty sun hat and she is completely absorbed by what she can see.

Shiota was inspired to use the piano as part of the structure as there wasn't a musical instrument of any kind in the chapel.  She also took her inspiration from a childhood memory of seeing the skeletal remains a neighbour's piano after a house fire.

The sheets of music trapped and woven into the woollen threads represent the scores of all the music that is recorded as having been played or sung in the chapel over the years and also an historic bell ringing score.

We left the chapel and wandered over the parched grass to find the next exhibition.

The Coffin Jump by Katrina Palmer is one of the WWI centenary art commissions by 14-18 Now.

It was inspired by the history of an extraordinary group of women who became the first all female First Aid Nursing Yeomanry which was founded in 1907.   The exhibit is sometimes accompanied by both sound and performance which is activated by a horse and rider jumping over but when we saw it it was quite still in its peaceful surroundings.

The nurses would rescue men straight from the battlefield thus making a direct link between the front line with the field hospitals.  In spite of the nurses' undoubted courage the British army would not support them as they didn't like to be associated with what they saw as  'liberated' women.  The nurses concentrated their efforts and skills in helping the French and Belgian armies by running hospitals and driving ambulances.

The words on the jump are taken from the diaries and other sources of members including nurse Muriel Thompson.  Phrases like 'Woman saves Man' 'Cut to Pieces' and 'Nothing Much Happened' highlight the heroism of these women.

We returned to the main galleries and had a quick look around the exhibition 'A Tree in the Wood' by Giuseppe Penone.  Central to the exhibition is Matrice a 30 metres long fir tree which has been cut in half and dissected along one of its growth rings.  I would have liked more time to explore the outside parts of this exhibition but we had to leave and get on our way home.

 I've put links to all three exhibits in each part if you want to follow up and find out more.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park - Part One

As promised in a previous post a few more photos and details about the exhibitions we saw on our visit to the YSP.  We travelled up through Buxton and Glossop and as we drove by the reservoirs to join the main Sheffield to Manchester road we could see the smoke from the fire on Saddleworth Moor which had started the night before.  We drove over Holme Moss by the transmitting station and down into Holmfirth to join the road towards Wakefield.

The first exhibition we saw was the one we had specifically gone to see -
The Wish Post by Mister Finch 

The accompanying leaflet says 'Welcome to the eccentric and fantastical world of The Wish Post - an intricately hand-sewn and constructed menagerie'.

'More than seventy-five individual soft sculptures showcase Mister Finch's masterful combination  of up-cycled and new materials'

The story of the exhibition centres around the magical kingdom where woodland animals collect and sort the wishes of other creatures which are breathed into envelopes and posted into toadstool postboxes.

For one night each year the woodland animals have the chance to have their wishes and dreams to be whisked away on the breeze and for them to come true.  The creatures gather together to prepare the wishes for the wind ahead of The Wish Post Festival.

It's a fascinating exhibition.  The lady on the reception desk said 'It's out of this world' and she was right.  The animals are quite magical and wonderfully sculptured and created.  I was enchanted by them.

In the exhibition you can find badgers with coats full of badges,  bell ringing hedgehogs, thimble tailed rats, rabbits with toadstools, elegant swans and dapper moles.

When we visited on Monday the exhibition had been open for two days and every one of the sculptures had been sold. How wonderful for Mister Finch.

I loved the badgers and the moles.  Fox and ratty were there too.  I was reminded of one of my very favourite childhood books The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham.

We wandered around the exhibition for ages taking it all in and marvelling at each new little intricacy we found.  It was time for a quick lunch in the cafe before moving on to another two exhibits which I'll show you in part two.