Photos of some of the Sacred and Profane art pieces:

Carrie came across as very personable, perfectly happy to talk to anyone who came up and asked, even posing for photos with passersby.

I wasn’t the only person standing around and gawping at the sight of a television personality in the flesh although I may have been one of the few trying to catch details of the camera being handled by the operator. I’m very much more a still photography sort of person but video work still holds an interest as many of the setup principles are the same, of course.

All the photos here are from a couple of lunchtime walks in Chilgrove during September, 2010. I didn’t have a macro lens at this time but the telephoto did well enough for landscapes and closer shots too.

This time of year saw the sunflowers out in abundance and over one hill near our office and down the other side there was a large pumpkin patch ready to be fully utilised for the oncoming Halloween period.

I love seeing insects doing whatever it is they feel compelled to do around plantlife. In later years I would have a very good macro lens for getting far closer to them and capturing far more detail.

Being out of the city also meant there were some insects you don’t normally see such as this Brimstone Butterfly. We tend to only see far more common varieties in our garden but I love the camouflage that has developed over millenia on creatures like this.

As you might imagine, where there are insects or any other small creatures for that matter, there will be birds. The two main types we saw at Chilgrove at this time of the year were the impressive raptors hovering high above before swooping down on mammals and rodents…

…and the unbelievably moronic pheasants. I don’t know how a bird can possibly evolve to both run instantly at the sight of a human yet also see or hear an approaching car and think to itself “I’ll just step out in front for a closer look at that”. A very regular occurrence was turning up at the office or arriving back home and spending a few minutes picking bits of pheasant out from the grille or washing down blood around the wheel arches where another suicidal avian had decided to interrupt the countryside drive.

Not all birds met their ends with automobiles, though. While it was attractive out in the countryside around Chilgrove nature would often remind you that it can also sometimes be a little unsettling too.

Butterflies

The first area in which we found ourselves was the butterfly house, warm and humid just how they like it and requiring me to simply observe the pretty little things for a few minutes until my camera lens had adjusted to the climate and stopped fogging over. I won’t pretend to know what any of the species were – I can just about identify Red Admirals, Peacocks, Commas, Brimstones, and Cabbage Whites – but some sleuthing now indicates that amongst the ones present during our visit to Earnley there may have been butterflies of type Owl, Northern Pearly Eye, Julia, and Malachite. I’m sure there’s a lepidopterist out there who could identify these butterflies for certain.

Birds

From the butterfly house we entered the caged surroundings of the bird enclosure. Like the butterflies these were birds of the more tropical and exotic kind, not typically found in deepest West Sussex. Also like the butterflies I can’t begin to identify all the different types of bird we saw other than cockatoos, which I think are the white ones. Are you an ornithologist? Do you want to add to the sum knowledge of the human species and identify the birds in the photos? I didn’t think so but it was worth a try.

Because the enclosures for both birds and butterflies in Earnley were surrounded by glass to keep a stable temperature, once you passed through the protective plastic doorways you were fully amongst the creatures and they were free to fly past your head or, as in the picture below, sit on your shoe and pose for a photo.

Garden

The next area in Earnley was a more conventional garden containing both plants and flowers you might expect to see in the local climate as well as a dry area housing cacti. I’m not even going to attempt to work out what any of the flowers or plants are as my floral knowledge extends roughly as far as classifying everything as either a daisy or something else.

I am fond of a cactus, partly, I suspect, because they look reasonably difficult to kill and I’m pretty sure I’d be hopeless at keeping any more demanding plant or flower alive.

Beasts

A small area for reptiles in the main completed the wildlife portion of Earnley. First up was one of my wife’s favourite animals (she used to have one when she was younger and still goes on about getting another), the tortoise.

As for me, I’m quite fond of the prehistoric look of some of the larger reptiles and an iguana in particular caught my eye. There’s something fascinating about their skin and the textures clearly present on their ancient-looking bodies.

Nostalgia Museum

In addition to the various forms of fauna and flora there was a small but very packed museum of retro items; I’m a sucker for old memorabilia, toys and games of yesteryear, vintage photos and magazines, etc. so this was joy to wander around. Photos from that visit will appear at some point on this site at which point this post will be updated to include a link to what we saw there and then too. And then we should probably get around to paying Earnley another visit just to see what else other than its name has changed since the last time we took a look at it.

The rain has stopped! The rain has finally stopped! And the weather forecast says it’ll stay dry this weekend. We have got to get out of the house and go somewhere.

And that’s the thrilling flashback covering the backstory behind a quick scroll around and zoom in on a map to find a place we’d never visited – in fact, a place we’d never heard of before – less than an hour away from our home: Amberley Museum. Open air? Fresh air will do us good! Industrial heritage? We like a bit of that! Vintage electronics? You can’t beat a bit of retro equipment perusing! Used as a filming location for a James Bond movie? Well, if we weren’t sold before then we are now! On a cold but clear Saturday we headed off.

Amberley Museum is north of Arundel, somewhere we’ve visited numerous times (Arundel has a lovely castle and very attractive gardens), so getting to Amberley was very simple. We’d checked the map before and it wasn’t immediately obvious where parking was located for the museum but as you approach the destination it’s all quite clear; parking is within the grounds of the nearby Amberley railway station. The free parking section reserved for museum visitors is locked up outside museum hours.

We had a pleasant chat with a very friendly member of staff at the ticket office for the museum who handed us a map and explained the best way to wander around the site’s acres of land, told us about the free bus and train rides running throughout the day, let us know that craftspeople and volunteers varied like the weather but you could count on at least three buildings where locals would be able to demonstrate old skills or answer questions, and then pointed out that all the communications were down and taking card payments electronically would involve some old-school shenanigannery. While that felt almost perfectly in tune with the heritage feel of the museum anyway we actually had enough cash on us to forego this necessity, helped by the January discount that the museum runs if you know the password. You’ll have to look online for that if you’re planning to visit in the off-season months.

Through the ticket office and gift shop then turning left presented us with some attractive brick buildings. In addition to public toilets at this spot there was also a brewery display, ironmonger’s shop, machine shop, print shop, and a shed housing some road steam and stationary steam engines. The print shop was the largest of the buildings and was a working one so if you want a custom print of some description to take away as a souvenir then this is the place to visit.

The building housing the TV and radio exhibition was next around Amberley in a roughly clockwise direction. This was jam-packed with everything from the early days of broadcasting entertainment and information over the air with displays dedicated to microphones and wartime communications to shelves of radio units in wooden or plastic casings and increasingly decorative styling to television sets and video recorders from the earliest days upwards. We liked the 1927 Royal Doulton loudspeaker in the form of a parrot “to make the technology more acceptable to the lady of the house” mostly for what that said about social attitudes of the time.

Art deco designs on the vintage radio sets were particularly beautiful but some of the early television sets with their tiny, curved screens were the standout pieces for me with their anachronistic futuristic appeals from the distant past.

About halfway through the TV and radio exhibition building there was a reproduction of an amateur radio room. We got talking to the volunteer nearby for several minutes and in the conversation we learned that the reproduction was effectively a mishmash of three genuine setups. I loved the very obviously amateur feel of this – the exposed wires, the spare equipment – but also the very real sense that someone had lived and loved this life – the mounted ashtrays, the kettle with its terrifyingly dangerous-looking wiring – and that feeling of dedication was almost tangible.

At the ticket office we’d been told that there might be a Tesla Coil demonstration in the Electricity Hall at the far end of the museum grounds at half past the hour and that excited us. We looked at the map and looked at the bus stop near where we’d exited the TV and radio exhibition and figured we’d take the bus as it was due to leave and we didn’t think we’d be able to walk to the hall in time. As already mentioned, there is a bus that runs around the site and there is also a narrow gauge railway running a train too so if you have mobility issues then these can alleviate some of your walking difficulties. Transportation is free and regular so you’re also able to ride both forms of transport as much as you like. We were the only people on the bus and about sixty seconds after setting off it had reached its destination as we hadn’t really grasped the map’s scale so we probably could have walked after all. But who doesn’t like a bus ride?

The first thing we did inside the Electricity Hall was head to the Tesla Coil to see if there would be problems viewing it or filming it. Viewing it, no. Filming it, yes, on account of the sign indicating that there would be no demonstrations on the day of our visit. That’s just the risk you take and we wouldn’t let it spoil our visit because we hadn’t even known it would be here before arriving. We shall have to return to Amberley Museum at some point and see if we can get lucky.

There are two sections to the Electricity Hall. The first section we entered contained a wide range of more industrial uses of electricity; engines, displays, power indicators, plus vehicles including electric bikes, Sinclair C5s, and a ridiculously cute Enfield 8000 Electric Car.

The second section of the hall was more interesting to us and if you’ve got children or have the mind of a child then it’s far more entertaining – and educational – too. This was dedicated to consumer uses of electricity so there were displays of fridges, freezers, vacuum cleaners, heated baths, cookers, washers, dryers, and personal electrical equipment for home use. Moreover, there were lots of interactive elements here, lots of buttons to push, levers to pull, handles to turn, and switches to throw, and it would be accurate to say that not a single one of those buttons, levers, handles, or switches got away without being used by either me or my wife. Lots and lots of fun.

Ah, the classic Polar Cub Electric Vibrator. For the lady of the house to use on her

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throat. Her throat.

A very short distance from the Electrity Hall was the BT Connected Earth building. As you’ve probably guessed, this was a part of the museum focussed on telephone communication and, like the building we’d just come from, this also featured a lot of things to play with for children aged 0-99: morse code, telegraph messaging, dialing and watching the electronic relays moving to connect calls, using rotary phones and calling other phones elsewhere in the building, that sort of thing. Noisy as well as entertaining and educational again – I even learnt some things and I’m a regular Mr Know-It-All usually – and it was great to see and be reminded of the explosion of new phone designs that came out from the 1960s onwards.

The grounds of Amberley Museum are surrounded on three sides by the chalk hills of the South Downs and we had a few moments to enjoy some of the attractive scenery on the crisp day of our visit as we crossed the railway tracks to the thing we next wanted to take a look at.

That thing we wanted to take a look at was one of the filming locations used in the James Bond film A View To A Kill. If you’ve seen the movie then you’ll know that the evil plot involved explosives in a mine at one point and the mine entrance in question for Operation Main Strike was here at Amberley. Having rewatched the scene where Grace Jones emerges with the explosives to the annoyance of Christopher Walken recently it’s amazing to see how incredibly recognisable the area still is so many years after the movie. Some information about the film along with a prop from it – a skip in which Roger Moore and Tanya Roberts rode (after it was apparantly smoothed down to make sure neither star caught their skin or clothing on its interior) – was in the nearby railway exhibit building.

Following a small diversion to watch the wheelwright keeping some children occupied with trying to fix spokes into the wooden hub of a wheel outside his shop we made our way down to the De Witt Kilns not through any strong love of the art of pottery but because the building itself looked fantastic. Set lower than the surrounding paths around the museum, waterlogged ground and train track running alongside, a couple of arguably eerie sculptures of kiln-workers in the vicinity because of the chill in the air and silence all around, the massive brick building with its arched kilns was the single most impressive structure on the museum’s site.

We were making our way back towards the museum entrance/exit at this point and the next set of buildings we came across were those of the garage and cycle shop and the Southdown bus garage. A family friend and my wife’s father both used to drive buses (and knew each other through that job years before my wife and I ever met) so we’re never disappointed to have a nose around the vintage transportation when we see it. The bus garage contained some nice examples of old vehicles but I especially liked the booking office next to it offering exciting bus trips such as a drive to North Wales or even a Mystery Tour!

The final things we saw during this visit to Amberley Museum were the Fire Station with a few examples of fire-fighting vehicles inside before slightly doubling back on ourselves to wander through Greenwood Village, a far more rural setting for woodcraft people to demonstrate stick making and wood turning. This was a pleasant area and probably a lot more enjoyable in the warmer months with more people around.

On the way to the exit we passed a shop and a café, the former not being open but likely to be so later in the year, while the latter appeared to be serving the small number of other visitors to the site.

We exited through the gift shop, naturally, and we bought things, naturally, because that’s what we do when we visit places we like.

We liked Amberley Museum a lot. For a spur-of-the-moment decision it turned out to be a great one with loads to see not just on this visit but with plenty to come back and see more of plus lots we didn’t get around to. There are nature trails which we’d like to walk once there has been a more sustained period of dry weather and there were lots of buildings that weren’t open because the volunteers or craftspeople hadn’t turned up on the day of our visit. You can get a rough idea who will be available on the museum’s website but nothing is guaranteed. And we’d love to see that Tesla Coil in action.

Amberley had a good mix of activities, education, and nostalgia suitable for a huge range of age; kids will love the train and bus and playing around with the phones and electrical elements; adults will love some of the vintage TV and radio equipment and they’ll also love the train and bus and playing around with the phones and electrical elements. An easy-to-find place in the country, lots to see and do, and some great-sounding events planned throughout the upcoming year that almost guarantees we’ll be back at least once in 2020. Why, yes, I am talking about the ale festival.

The lens used in this case is the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM and it’s a fabulous piece of equipment; the bokeh is so dreamily soft. It’s been a while since I really went out and used it a lot and I must try to rectify that.

I can’t tell you what any of the plants in the following pictures are; I know what I find attractive and that’s about the limit of things. There’s a bee in these photos. Do I know what type of bee it is? I do not. It’s only the fact I know enough to type in “green bug” in a search engine that I can tell you that the green bug below is a green shield bug (Palomena prasina).

First up is our garden with the monstrous lilac bush and already-rotting-by-this-time decking looking quite nice covered in a layer of iced water.

A day after that snow covered our garden we took a walk down to nearby Kingston Cemetery where clear blue skies, a low wintry sun, and clean snow over the graveyard made for some pretty views.

The final pictures are from where I was working at the time: a set of buildings in the middle of the Chilgrove countryside in West Sussex, around twenty minutes away by car in good conditions but at this time with the slippery, snowed-in roads probably closer to twice that.

The following photos were all taken in June 2015 in and around Chichester which is where I was working at the time.