Just a news item, though I am thrilled that Em has drawn me a beautiful portrait of Moss, a photo of which she sent last night, but that will come in the New Year. Today a migraine hovers behind my eyes and it is also LS's birthday, so we are going to town for a meal and to photograph the Marconi Building and hopefully my head will not give way to a full blown migraine!
But the news that the Didcot Mirror was saved from leaving the country is good, not as beautiful as the Desborough, Mirror, Celtic craftmanship at its best, but the curvilinear design is simplified in the Didcot. There is a quote below outlining some of the uses for the mirrors, it must also not be forgotten that Iron Age men had very fancy hairstyles as well.
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| Didcot Mirror |
“They would certainly have been prestigious items, owned by few people. Mirrors can be used to reflect light into dark spaces or to signal across distances as well as to apply make-up or check your hair. In many cultures mirrors are magical objects, which reflect an alternative view of the world, or act as a portal to another world, like Alice found in Through the Looking Glass. This may well have been the case in Iron Age, Druidic society, and mirrors may be connected to fortune telling or shamanic activity. While this mirror was a casual find with no archaeological context, some have been found in association with cremation burials, so mirrors may also have had a function connected with death or afterlife.”
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| Detail on Didcot mirror |
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I do think it is so important that beautiful things like this stay in this country, so I agree with what you say Thelma.
ReplyDeleteWell not all things stay in the country, there is a debacle about a ten million pound Roman statue at the moment, and therein lies the problem, where did it come from in the first place.
ReplyDeleteSeeing the Didcot Mirror takes me back to my Degree days - this is just amazing, and the basket-weave decoration an original idea (can't recall seeing it much on other I/A metalware. Glad it's staying here anyway.
ReplyDeleteLovely header photo - could do with a few days of summer to cheer me up right now. We'll just have to look forward to the Solstice instead.
Hi Jennie, Well I did Wiltshire abbeys for my diploma, and would not mind getting back to them. Well the Great Cistercian abbeys of Yorkshire to be precise, hopefully if we move up there it can be done.
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