I was still pretty frustrated that nothing opened very early and after marching all over town I ended up at the Ashmolean highly recommended as a ‘lovely’ little museum.
Just in case you plan to drop by let me tell you now – the Ashmolean is under renovation. This year it’s open about half strength, next year it will be closed altogether. While we’re at it the Bate Music museum is also closed this year and Pitt Rivers closed about three days before I arrived in Oxford. (Quite a shame really because it came highly recommended.)
The part of the Ashmolean that is open and on display includes two galleries of paintings which chronicle the development of the art to modern times. As I am no art critic these probably went under appreciated. There is a special display called the ‘Treasures of the Ashmolean’ which if I remember properly was just past the painters and drop clothes and across from the antique porringers, chamber pots and the like. The largest item in this display was a cape of sorts covered in little conch shells which once belonged to the father of Pocahontas. The smallest item would have to be one of an assortment of gems. The Egyptian rooms in the basement were still open. Part of a tomb or perhaps a low chapel-sized temple, the requisite mummy, a sphinx, some stone tablets and another roomful of artifacts and a roomful of scarabs. The scarab display was quite impressive. Mounted much like a beetle display each little stone corresponded with its number or description handwritten long ago in neat, thin lines. The paper was beginning to wrinkle and the ink had faded to a sepia brown and there were all these lines and lines of itty-bitty beetles as if they had been arranged by some fantastic Victorian collector. The shameful thing is that the whole thing will probably be dismantled when the ‘renovation’ hits that part of the museum – it is quite marvelous the way it is. I doubt it can be improved upon by transferring everything out of the old wooden cases or giving it a vertical mount.
Then it was back to Merton and off to Windsor. Let me just add here that an afternoon is far too short a time to properly explore the place – oh, yeah and it starts shutting down about 4 p.m. We didn’t leave Oxford until 2 p.m. so you can guess that we didn’t have much time.
One of our group wanted to see the famous doll house so once inside it was a sprint of a walk to the doll house entry. There is one benefit of arriving late in the afternoon: everyone else has given up and gone home. There was no line. The doll house itself is massive and apparently has working lights and toilets (although we did not try them).
The rest of the tour was quite incredible. My favorite was the old guard ‘lounge’ area with walls covered in weapons. Pistols, rifles, swords, jeweled swords locked in glass cabinets and you can look back from that room and see the display with the tiger’s head and stuff, looking forward is this massive hall where carved and painted bosses represent the shields of those families included in the Order of the Garter. In fact, much of the tour was stuff related to the Order of the Garter. The interesting thing about the ceiling is that some of the shields were blank – these members had failed in some respect and their crests removed. It was huge and quite incredible.
We were really rushing through, but we’d neglected to note that entry to St. George’s Chapel closes early – we weren’t due back at the bus for a while and had left some time and the end for the chapel and outdoors. Mistake. The minute we exited the building it started to pour buckets and we ran down the hill where we would spend the better part of half and hour waiting in the rain for the slowpokes. One of our professors was – throughout the trip – very punctual in a fashionably late sort of way. We could have left sooner or made a dash for some other shelter but for waiting for our rear guard. The girls hit the gift shop and then we all hung out under the exit gate and watched men wearing sunglasses pull through the gate in dark-tinted sedans while the guards paced around with machine guns. Thoroughly entertaining.
