Budleigh Past and Present

  The latest arrival on Fairlynch Museum's new noticeboard is a poster advertising the free workshop on Saturday 14 November at the Exeter Community Centre on ‘Legacies of British slave-ownership.’ It's organised by the History Department at University College London. Details can be found at   http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/  The poster was circulated to Devon museums including Fairlynch. No doubt organisers of the workshop feel that there are many in the county who have strong views about the issue of slavery and the extent to which Devonians were involved in it. I touched on the issue in an earlier post following my visit to the exhibition ‘West Country to World’s End - The South West in the Tudor Age’ at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery. To read it click  he re Devon historian Dr Todd Gray devoted a whole book to the subject in his 2007 publication Devon an...

Fairlynch Museum 's Environment Room holds a store of treasures from a large range of sources. From stuffed birds and a Victorian ornithologist's jottings to the remarkable pebbles that Nobel prize winner Max Perutz wrote about in the 1930s. From Bronze Age tools and Roman pottery to collections of shells and fossils from the Jurassic coast. Not too many of the latter were actually found in Budleigh, with a major exception which caused some excitement when it was first described in 1863. This was the discovery that the quartzite pebbles, or 'popples' as they were known, contained fossilised brachiopods - shellfish similar to molluscs.   Shown above on display in the Museum, they were first written about by the amateur geologist William Vicary (1811-1903). A tanner by trade, Vicary did so well in business that he was able to retire to Exeter , where he was one of the founding members of the Devonshire Association, established in 1862. As an enthusiastic col...

  The sponge Clathrina Coriacea (Montagu, 1818) was greatly admired by Henry Carter Image credit Fiona Crouch, Marine Biological Association of the UK There’s an awful lot of science in Fairlynch’s 2013 exhibition ‘Sea, Salt and Sponges.’ There’s fearsome-looking medical equipment, a fine display of microscopes and much information about the geology of places ranging from India to Canada , not forgetting Devon of course. Not to mention the surprisingly intricate anatomy of sponges with all those complex chemicals that they produce which are providing useful weapons in the war against cancer and other diseases. But Budleigh scientist and FRS Henry Carter (1813-95) whose bicentenary the Museum is celebrating was an artist in his way. He often shows himself in his writings charmed by the beauty of the marine species that he examined. Of the sponge Clathrina Coriacea (Montagu, 1818), pictured above, which he found on Budleigh beach he wrote “I t veils the dark rock benea...