WORLD CLASS MUSEUMS DON’T open up on one’s doorstep everyday, but it’s just happened to me.  ‘Just’ meaning towards the end of last year. But then, given that the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is the oldest public museum in the world (dating back to 1678) its astonishing refurbishment over several years  and re-opening  last November does feel like yesterday. It’s taken the weeks since for the horrible truth about the new museum to dawn on me, which is that nothing changes when it comes to museums  and the way they rob us of the past by putting it in aspic.

I was first taken to the Ashmolean nearly sixty years ago by my mother who wanted me to see its greatest treasure – the Alfred Jewel. This is the exquisite gold and rock crystal creation which was placed at the head of a pointer used to read manuscripts and which has the words Aelfred me heht gewyrcan worked into it. They mean ‘Alfred had me made’ and most authorities agree that the object belonged to King Alfred himself.

In those days the Ashmolean was a marvellously old fashioned, fusty, dusty, echoey place and I remember being led through its scary shadows and Egyptian mummies to look at the jewel, which I could only see by standing on tiptoe. It was – it is – a marvellous creation and though rather younger than the glass and metal sphere which lies at the heart my  Hyddenworld quartet, I have no doubt that it was during that first visit to the museum in 1952, and seeing the jewel, that the seeds for Hyddenworld were sown. Certainly my love of old artefacts and the stories they can tell was born then.

Today the dust and the shadows have gone and the Alfred Jewel, like all the other objets, is to be found by way of  pristine stairways,  open plan spaces, plate glass stronger than steel, perfectly lit displays of everything-and-its-aunt under the sun,  and a dizzying central atrium until you finally reach it and sigh. It is reduced  now to just another soft-lit relic on the hit-list of the photocopied sheets which parties of school children tote around on their tick-box educational tours of this museum as all of them.  Which is when the ‘but… but… but…’ doubts begin to bubble up in your mind.

I HAVE OFTEN asked myself – in fact every single time I go to a museum – what they are for and why most of them offer such an unsatisfactory experience. But none has ever confronted me with those questions so brutally as the New Ashmolean now does.  I walk around, I marvel at the artifice of the displays, I read the captions general and particular and I ask myself  why they leave behind such a sense of poverty in mind and spirit; and why I feel I have been exposed to much but learnt very little, if anything at all.  The answers are not so difficult to find.

First, we learn very little by simply looking at them. Real learning is experiential, not through a glass darkly, and it is impossible to make any real sense of a roman coin, an exquisite piece of Japanese netsuke, or a great Tibetan bell, without spending the first, toggling the second (they are used as toggles for clothes) and  hearing the third ring out. Not allowed: look, don’t touch. Look but never know.

The curators can tell you what they know, they can surround an object with context, they can produce flow maps to show where something came from, they can perform the equivalent of exhibition looping the loops, but they cannot impart real experience or even their own.  You could say, ‘Ah! But look at the effect on you, William,  of that first visit to the Ashmolean!’

To which I reply, it was my mother who took me, held my hand and explained one on one what the jewel was, why it is so precious, what a miracle it is that it survived, why pointers were needed to read old manuscripts, who ‘Aelfred’ was. .. and then, taking me outside into Beaumont Street where my godfather used to work as an accountant, and she worked as a secretary, said, ‘but never forget, this is where it all happens now.’

Years later I asked her what she meant. What happens? ‘Life,’ she said, as dismissive of museums as she was of Academe.  No  wonder I have doubts. The second of which is my dislike of seeing things behind glass, or in a pool of light, which quite obviously don’t belong there but back where they were first purloined from. Bells are the best example because clearly a bell is dead that cannot ring.  Nor has a runic gravestone from Norway  any place at all in the Ashmolean. It should be where it was first placed and if I had my way it would be on the next plane to Oslo.

As I and my partner are, in a truly miniscule way, patrons of the New Ashmolean (you can find our names among many more etched on plate glass on Level 3), we were invited to one of several previews of the new museum. Something very, very remarkable happened which underlines these thoughts and ought to happen routinely in  every museums in the world.  As a PR exercise the curators of each section of the museum were dragged out of their closets and made to  stand around and about their particular gallery and answer questions from us punters. They looked rather uncomfortable, preferring I imagine the comfort zone of their secret work and places. We talked to various of them and suddenly, once they were prodded and poked sufficiently to emerge from their shells,  their galleries came alive.

Now they’ve all gone, back into their cubby holes, down corridors to which we have no access, snuffling about in the trough of wonderful objects upon which the rest of us can never properly feed and, when the dark days of February turn even the brightest displays gloomy, flying off gratis to conferences in  Delhi and Me-he-i-coh or however it’s pronounced, to swarm like busy well fed  bees with their curator fellow bees  and plot the creation of yet more new museums which will exclude us from the real experience of the objects they preserve.  If you doubt me take a close look at the photos in this link, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/8347232.stm which shows some New Ashmolean interiors as perfectly  - and as lifelessly – as the objects displayed there. That’s the problem.

What I’d really like to see is every museum curator in the land forced to spend a day of every working week in the gallery for which he or she is responsible answering questions from ordinary folk and letting  us handle objects which were never meant to be preserved for ever but made to be used, enjoyed and finally discarded.

A REMINDER THAT I will one day die came yesterday in a spooky way. My readers may remember that in a previous post I promised to find out whose memorial in the nave of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford,  has the striking skull which stares balefully down at the congregation, sometimes including me. I popped into the cathedral yesterday to find out.

Not as easy as it might seem since, unlike any other cathedral that I know in the British Isles, this one is protected by bowler-hatted proctors who firmly direct would-be visitors away from the main gate to a far distant one where they must pay an entrance fee. I explained I was Oxford-born, carried a Bodleian Library Readers ticket and that cathedrals are public access. The proctor said it meant my crossing the private  ground of the college and what was my business?  Unless, he added rather darkly when I stayed silent, I was going in to pray? He let me through.

The skull, which is halfway down the nave on the right, proved to be a momento mori or reminder we all die, in the form of an Angel of Death. It was   part of an early 18^th century memorial to Henry Aldrich (1647 – 1710) who was Vice Chancellor of the University in 1692 and died in the city in 1710.

I LOOKED AT the angel and he looked at me and I thought that was the end of it, photograph taken, inscription noted down, mission accomplished.  I was wrong, someone had decided I hadn’t got the message: maybe the proctor, maybe the Angel, maybe they were one and the same. Because,  wandering on, I reached a chapel devoted to military memorials. In a mahogany case was the  Book of Remembrance of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, whose pages are  turned daily in memory of the fallen. I  rarely look at such books because one doesn’t know or have connection with the people listed. But on this occasion I felt very strongly drawn to do so by a feeling  as powerful as an unseen iron hand gripping my arm and leading me there.

I somehow knew before I looked that my surname would be there, and it was, the first on the page: HORWOOD, Albert Dennis, killed in Germany on 24^th March 1945.  These days it does not take long to follow up such clues on the internet. Within moments of getting home I found that Albert’s  brother was… William J Horwood. I was christened Julian William but because I write as William my initials are often reversed by others in official documents and I become William J Horwood, like Albert’s brother…  The second unsettling  thing was that Albert was killed in action in the Reichswald Forest, very near a place I had been looking at in my Times Atlas earlier in the day as  a location for use in  Hyddenworld: Summer.

People may shrug their shoulders at such coincidences and  dismiss them as chance. Until it happens to them, with the Angel of Death close up and personal. Then  they, too, might  feel that they have just experienced their own strange momento mori.

YOU MIGHT EASILY imagine that the avenue  of  pollarded  and misshapen trees on the horizon in my picture are marching into battle  like the forest of ents in Lord of the Rings – and  that the huge, time-bleached,  trunk in the foreground is one of their fallen comrades.  You can find this  striking arboreal procession just south of the  Oxfordshire village of Wilcote, on its strange way through medieval farmland to Lady Well, one of Britain’s many surviving holy wells.

You might think too, if you’ve never been to such a place, that holy wells are more or less forgotten, unvisited and have lost their power. Not so.   Belief in their healing power and that of many other such ancient places of spirit and sanctuary is  very much alive, as it has been for millennia. Wells and springs have always been regarded as magical.  Our ancestors appreciated rather better than we sometimes do that  without water there would be no life.

I  visited Lady Well this Sunday just past.  Though it’s only a half hour drive from my house I doubt I would have thought of going there  but for an entry in a new book by Janet Bord: Holy Wells In Britain, A Guide (Heart of Albion Press, 2008). She has  produced many books on subjects related to our not-so-Hyddenworld. This one is the companion to her earlier Cure and Curses: Ritual and Cult at Holy Wells. Her description of the well, its near-secret location and the fact that it was once a place regularly visited on Palm Sunday by locals wanting to make liquorice water for the cure of various ailments, was so seductive, I went to visit it.

The mile-long downhill path to the well starts very near the village church, which is where I parked my car.  I immediately had an encounter which affirmed my belief that wells attract good spirits. There was a couple sitting in the churchyard on a seat placed there in memory of someone dead who had loved the place. They had a large skittish dog with them and they sat as if on tenterhooks, expecting imminent disaster. I said hello and asked if the dog was safe since it looked almost out of control. They said it probably was but as they had only had it two days and it was a rescue dog on its first outing, they were not sure.  I guessed that their uneasy posture had to do with the fear that the dog, named Jerry,  was about to go AWOL. The gate into the church yard was firmly closed and I made sure to close it after me when I ventured nearer to ask if they knew where the path to the holy well was.

The truth was I already knew the answer because it was clearly marked on my OS map. But I have found that asking directions in villages and explaining what one is about often elicits something interesting or unexpected from otherwise reticent inhabitants. The man said he had never heard of a holy well but if the path I wanted was the one down past the church and across the field then it led to a ‘rather a special place’. He had walked it once before and remembered it. There were strange trees he said, a lovely old path, and… the expression on his face said the rest. Like so many people in Britain, he might not know about holy wells but he certainly appreciated the spirit of place. He volunteered to take me part of the way while his partner looked after the dog. ‘The path splits and people here don’t exactly make it obvious which way to go,’  he explained darkly. I knew what he meant. There are often places which communities like to keep to themselves: just as there are common lands, there are common secrets.

He was a lovely, warm,  man with a Dickensian face; she looked a happy woman. You can tell  when people are in love, they exude an inclusive, happy spirit.   My guide  did rather better than simply direct me where to go. He knew as well exactly  when to stop, leaving me at the point where I saw the first of the avenue of trees Janet Bord describes.  You must find the rest out for yourself his parting smile seemed to say.

It was the most benign of introductions to a special place and a reminder of why they survive in peoples’ consciousness down the centuries, their history forgotten, their names changed,  but lines of communication with the long-dead still intact – they have a spirit which is  very infectious. Good things happened there in the past and these  engender more in the present.

The trees were a mixture of ash and oak, much pollarded and very ancient. It was obvious they were cared for in the best possible of ways – apart from the regularly pollarding they were left alone, to thrive, to thicken, to  grow again. Many were hollowed out with time, others split, a few fallen.  Some had been replaced with young ash. They led in two rows down a deep fold in  the landscape, the air increasingly damp, the hedges and old trees mossy, the distant buildings made of  mellow Cotswold stone; and the first wild flowers, snow drops and yellow aconite,  beginning to show.

No-one was about but many had been there, walking down the way I went in times more superstitious than our own, troubled people seeking guidance, trusting people filled with hope, lovers, children, farm workers and servants from the Manor by the church. This last I knew because Janet Bord reports that water from the well was carried up for consumption at the Manor.  As I walked  I was therefore alone yet not alone. It was indeed a special place.

THE WELL, AS MY SECOND picture shows, was very well protected by a circular stone wall, gated for access. The lock was rusted, the well filled with hart’s tongue fern, water flowing out from under the wall to waterlogged land down-slope of it. From a spot nearby another spring flowed into that same  area; then I saw a third… and a fourth.  Water issued forth everywhere. The day was damp and dull, the vegetation all about leafless, rotten trees lay prone and mossy in running water. Forget Hollywood film sets, this  seemed more like the kind of place where Arthur might have found Excalibur.

Nearby the well, bent and gnarled like an old witch, which it probably was, was a hawthorn tree covered in black ivy. Hanging from its branches were a few scraps of white cloth, left behind by spirit worshippers. Sometimes you’ll find crosses of twigs, wound round with wool but I saw none there.  Nor evidence of fires lit at dusk and invocations made.

People sometimes say that the old traditions must have been interesting to observe; and folklorists ‘collect’ them, as if they are collectible.  They are not in any true spiritual sense collectable at all but  there is no need for them to be. We who stand there now are the tradition, we its living proof and what we do its time-honoured rituals. A place like Lady Well reminds visitors that we don’t need special training, or to be antiquarians, or have a special set of beliefs, or to be knowledgeable about anything much at all, to be a part of things: we simply need to be ourselves and open to the natural world it is our brief turn to occupy.

I did not on this occasion  leave anything behind other than my thoughts. It may seem strange but when I take photographs of such a place I rarely leave offerings as well.  For me, one excludes the other. I will prefer to go back camera-less another time to tie ribbons of my own to the old witch of a tree and add my scrap of spirit to a place that came before I did and will be there long after… and anyway, it was getting dark and the trees in the avenue above seemed to be looming and about to move towards me.

Later, driving home, I think I made more sense of why that couple sat so edgily on  the seat, as if uncertain of the future. They were middle aged and new in their relationship. I guess the decision to get a rescue dog was an important one for them, in some way a cementing  of their love, a commitment to caring together for a life in addition to their own. My arrival disturbed a private moment but the spirit of the place worked its magic and turned it into something that somehow included me.

Next time I go to Wilcote the air will be warmer and drier and violets and celandine will have arrived. I’ll tie ribbons in the tree for Jerry and his owners, as well as for myself and  those I love, and pay homage to  the spirit of place,  which resides  in all of us.

Lady Well can be found on OS Explorer Map 180 grid reference SP374147.  The Heart of Albion Press’s full  catalogue is at www.hoap.co.uk

A fall of snow is a sudden hushed delight so overwhelming in its transformation of the world about us that we rush to take pictures of it, as I did in mid-January. But the sense of wonder lasts only as long as the snow is virginal, which isn’t long. Soon it becomes a freezing, inconvenient, dangerous blight that over-stays its welcome.

Then as swiftly as it came it turns to drips from trees and gutters, puddles underfoot, soggy cardboard boxes left outside until, in a blink of an eye, it’s gone both in reality and, almost, memory. In fact few things become a distant memory as fast as snow.

The photographs we took vanish almost as completely as the substance itself, no more than binary traces in Random Access Memory, which we never access again.  Or, for those who can still remember film, pictures of snow in years gone by are consigned to packets of photographs, shoved in boxes, and left to congeal in the darkness of cupboards and attics where only dust continues to fall.

Our memory too, whether individual, familial or communal, is astoundingly short-term. If it was used as a diagnostic test of our functional competence we would fail.  I am talking about historical memory about fundamentally important things like who we are, where we came from and the obstacles we overcame to arrive where we are now.  We lose the memory of these things so fast, both individually and collectively, that it’s awesome: what was once so important vanishes from our lives as if it never was.

For example, none of us would exist at all but for the life-long struggles, loves, tribulations and brief triumphs of our great grand-parents. But ask most people who theirs were, what they did, where they lived and they usually do not know.  Or if they know something it reduces a life to a single short sentence, probably inaccurate. My maternal great grandfather George Robinson ‘went to America’ – that’s all I know.  His paternal counterpart is lost to me entirely.

Most of us know only little more about our grand-parents and when we do it’s in the form of inaccurate snippets of places, years, names, maybe occupations. Rarely lives.  It’s horrible to admit, but our children know,  really know, very little about us.

It will not take long for us to cease to exist, as if we have never been.

I live near a very large cemetery, so funeral processions go past my door regularly. Occasionally I pop across the street to observe the burials, it being free, open to the public, and full of character and interest for a novelist. But once the day of burial is past the floral tributes die, soon piled in a distant corner of the cemetery where they cannot so easily be seen; and the cemetery visits become less and less frequent, except for a few who cling on to memory, unable or unwilling to let go.  Until they too die and the graves begin to get covered in lichen, begin to rest in peace.

I am not Jewish but I like to visit that section of the cemetery because there are no floral tributes, no jam jars filled with dead flowers and dirty water, no faded ribbon. Just, here and there, a few pebbles, piled like a cairn in a mountain wilderness.

There was a fashion in earlier centuries for the creation of church memorials which reminded the living of the how transitory life is, by depicting the deceased in thin, skeletal form, or with a skull as part of the monument. There’s one ten feet up in the nave of Oxford Cathedral I often find staring at me.  Do I know his name, or what he did, or even if he was a he? I don’t, but in homage to him and the many forgotten ones like him, I’ll find out next time I attend a service and post the information here where… naturally… it will soon be forgotten once again.

Often, if we return to those images we took so impulsively, we find things we didn’t notice at the time.  Like the felled trees in my image of snow in Wytham Wood, near Oxford, which I only see now for what they are: something transitory too, though longer than snow in a temperate climate. But not by much!

From the geological view of things, neither lasted any time at all. If you imagine time since the beginning of prehistory to be that of a game of football, the period up to recorded history is the full ninety minutes; recorded history is extra time; our own lives no more than the blast of the final whistle. Unlike us, however, snow will come back again and again, and again. Each time it will briefly transform the world, and maybe our graves and places of memorial as well, to the delight of those who follow us. As for our great-grandparents, we may not know much about them but we do know this: if they lived their lives where snow once fell, they too knew its virgin beauty and saw it disappear with the sands of time.