Budleigh Past and Present

  A wheely special garden feature for the Museum I’ve been waiting quite a time for a spell of fine weather and some summer floweriness to show off this garden feature at Fairlynch Museum. Yesterday it was looking at its best when it was joined  by my friend Annie. Wheelbarrow planters are common enough items for sale at garden centres. But this one, sited on the pavement outside the Museum, is rather special, says Bob Wiltshire, chairperson of Budleigh in Bloom, which donated the wheelbarrow and arranged the display. It is, with its metal wheel, so Bob tells me, “a genuine antique with an authentic squeak.” It's certainly over 100 years old and  came originally from Lochmaben, a small town in Scotland,   according to Sylvia Pavey, the local resident who gave it to Budleigh in Bloom. She looks forward to seeing it for many years more, looking splendid with ever-changing floral displays in its final resting-place outside ...

  Cataloguing all the artefacts at Fairlynch is a time-consuming but fascinating activity, especially when there’s a story attached to a particular acquisition. But it’s frustrating for our volunteers when there seems to be no hint of when an item turned up in the Museum, or indeed where it came from. Some recent examples are the finely woven silk pieces shown here, one of them being identified as 20th century Indian embroidery. However two others caught the eye of our Antiquities Consultant Piers Motley-Nash, who tells us that they are Chinese and probably 19th century or even earlier. The above panel showing a bird in flight, facing the sun, is typical of the embroidered Rank Badges made for civil officials during the Qing dynasty which ruled China from 1644 to 1911.  Such panels, with their intricately worked embroidery full of symbolic detail, are collectors’ items. The Museum is keen to discover the source of these three items, as th...