Skipton, Saturday Afternoon. Market stalls line the street, the butcher auctions his last few joints and the greengrocers shout ‘50p for a bag o’bananas, any bag, 50p!”. We struggle up the street, and it is literally packed with people out for the afternoon, doing a bit of shopping, and it’ll only get busier between now and Christmas. We reach the Town Hall at the top of the high street, and there’s quite a few people milling in and out to investigate the craft fair that’s advertised outside. The tea and cake is flying out of the kitchen. A few people stop to look at the display boards that spill out from the museum and into the main corridors of the town hall, and I leave Mum in the temporary exhibition of local art (which is peaceful and calm compared to the street outside) and head upstairs to the museum proper.
Silence. Where has everybody gone? I am actually the only person here, until a museum assistant struggles past with a Hoover, says hello, laughs at me playing with the interactive activities for kids, and disappears behind a door marked ‘staff only’. I always wonder what’s behind those doors. This is a really nice local museum, traditional without being stuffy, crammed full of interesting little stories about the area, fascinating objects, and things to play with. I particularly liked the hippopotamus skull sitting on the front desk, silently guarding the staff’s selection of novels and magazines. There’s dressing up clothes, and a microscope with slides for the kids, loads of books, colour sheets and a choice of two museum trails, and with a joyous disregard for health and safety, a real stone quern to turn and grind wheat. My mum failed to ‘supervise me closely’ when I was playing with this (I mean, doing important research) and I got covered in flour, but it was good fun and would make kids think, if just for a second, the sheer amount of effort that went into just feeding a family in ‘the olden days’.
The Craven Museum has had quite a bit of publicity recently, including a full page profile in the Museums Journal, regarding its discovery of a First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. They must have got some specific funding to display the Folio, as this is the most modern part of the museum. The First Folio has it’s own little shrine, almost, with some information boards telling both the stories of the book itself and it’s importance, and how it came to be here in Skipton. There’s a film narrated by Patrick Stewart (renowned Shakespearean actor/ local lad done good) and a facsimile of the introduction to the First Folio and Macbeth, so that people can turn the pages and have a good read.
All in all, the Craven Museum is a lovely little spot to take a break from all the hustle, bustle and rampant consumerism of the Christmas period, have a sit, have a think, discover something about the area you didn’t know before, entertain your children and be fascinated by the past. But no-one knows it’s there! So please, Craven Museum, get a big sign outside telling people that you exist (and that you’re free) and let them come and see what you have to offer!
