Tanks rumble across No Man’s Land, submarines patrol the sea, soldiers stand guard and munitions workers labour day and night - all in stained glass. They feature in three of the windows in St Mary’s Church, which, together with a stone cross, constitute Swaffham Prior’s unique memorial to World War I.

Created in 1919, the windows were designed by CP Allix; local squire, church benefactor and a man apparently fascinated with machines. The windows have lots of small scenes, each accompanied by Biblical texts, some of which seem rather laboured, as if they have been levered in to justify the images.

The first one starts with a barrage balloon floating among the stars while searchlights comb the sky and a tank roams the plains. Not the sort of thing you usually see in churches. Under a biplane flying though glassy blue skies is the text ‘Though they climb up to heaven thence will I bring them down.’ Was Biggles an agent of the Almighty in his battles with the Red Baron? As they stack up the shells they‘ve made, female munitions workers are encouraged by ‘Whatsoever your hand findeth to do, do it with your might.’

The fascination with technology is undimmed in the second window - ‘Though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea thence will I command the serpent’ accompanies a fantastic painting of a submarine, complete with riveted sections, periscopes and a complex rudder mechanism. On the surface a ship steams along happily, but not for long… now you see it sinking under the waves, where you can also admire four different types of mine.

After that the belligerence starts to lessen. Hospital nurses help casualties and, elsewhere in the world British engineers build a pipeline to bring water to the desert. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour like thyself’ is the inspiring text for an illustration of what seems to be a YMCA shelter – surely the world’s ONLY instance of this organisation appearing in sacred art?

The final window extols the benefits of peace. There are bright scenes of sheep grazing, men ploughing fields, women gathering crops and so on. It’s all very nice and cheery but you can just tell his heart wasn’t in it, or perhaps there just wasn’t enough technology to interest him. If only the Massey Ferguson and the mechanised milking parlour had been invented in time to liven up those pastoral idylls.

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Posted by Lucy on May 23, 2009 | Permalink

Fat fortunes were made and lost in the Butter Exchange, where now the stone cow’s head looks down, not on the city’s dairy kings, but on the visitors to the Cork Butter Museum

And it’s a sign of just how important the butter business was that it occupies the full two floors of this 19th-century building – the biggest Butter Exchange in Europe.

It’s here that you’ll learn how the lushness of the grass in the south of Ireland makes the milk particularly rich and flavoursome - the perfect raw material for really good butter.

You’ll be taken through the complete history of Irish butter, from being stored in bogs to keep ‘fresh’ - marvel at the ‘1000-year-old keg of butter’ - to the glory days of the worldwide butter empire. In fact by 1900, Cork butter was so popular it was exported to all over the globe, including Jamaica and Australia, in tins and heavily salted to preserve it during the journey. Just a few decades later refrigeration knocked the bottom out of the market until Kerry Gold modernised Irish butter production and turned the faltering trade into today’s mighty butter behemoth.

I have to admit to first being a little sniffy at the idea of a butter museum, then secretly hoping for giant butter sculptures or trombone-playing butter men a la Douglas the Lurpak mascot.

The Museum pays full tribute to a crucial section of the Irish economy. From the actual making of butter - to most of us probably a bit of mystery involving vague ideas about churning - to the selling of it, including the changing design of butter wrappers – my favourite being the one from 1922 exhorting consumers to do their patriotic duty and buy Irish Free State butter – just about every aspect of the business is covered.

And it’s located in Shandon, a hillside of shabby, decaying yet enticing little 19th century streets which are definitely worth a wee wander.

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Posted by Lucy on March 16, 2009 | Permalink

Where once thousands of football fans cheered on their team, silent trees now crowd together on the terraces in an eerie relic of a city's sporting past.

The weeds and moss are creeping over the concrete steps and terraces, the wind and rain have stripped the paint from the barriers and silver birch trees have invaded intersections of the old stands.

Cathkin Park, in Glasgow, was once the home of Third Lanark, a founder member of the Scottish Football Association (1873). Established just one year earlier as the Third Lanark Rifle Volunteers, an sporting off-shoot of a regiment of the 'territorial army' of the day, they went on to also help found the Scottish League in 1890, becoming First Division Champions in 1904 and Second Division winners in 1935.

Nicknamed the Warriors, the Redcoats, the Hi-Hi and the Thirds, they played in scarlet in their southside home for almost 100 years.

In 1923 the team toured Argentina, a curious echo of the later adventure of former player Ally MacLeod, manager of Scotland in the 1978 World Cup. He was a schoolboy signing for Third Lanark, playing with them for nine years. Other names of note were two goalkeepers – Lisbon Lion Ronnie Simpson and, further back in time, Scotland goalie Jimmy Brownlie, who became manager of Dundee United after the First World War.

The club's history included a late flowering; they made it to the 1960 Scottish League Cup Final and finished third in the First Division in 1961, scoring 100 goals in 34 matches.

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Posted by Lucy on October 16, 2008 | Permalink