Matters Geological...
by Bernie Bell - 08:04 on 21 August 2024
Matters Geological...
…at the Stromness Museum.
It was a rainy morning – too wet for gardening - so we decided to go to Stromness Museum to see the Summer exhibition which centres on the life and work of two Orkney geologists – Ted Kellock and Matthew Forster Heddle….
….and includes the culmination of a year’s worth of work to digitise Ted Kellock’s collection of microscope-thin sections.
Visitors can see the rock samples themselves and the microscope slides created from the samples, alongside photos taken with the Museum’s microscope of the slides under plane and cross-polarized light.
It occurred to me that this is the kind of research which has led to the Altar Stone at Stonehenge being identified as Old Red Sandstone from Scotland….
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02584-2
Exhibition highlights also include a selection of Forster Heddle’s mineralogy collection from the National Museum of Scotland. The Museum is extremely grateful to the Royal Society for a ‘Places of Science’ grant, which has enabled them to arrange this loan of minerals collected by one of Scotland’s greatest mineralogists, who was born and brought up in Hoy.
This is the first time these minerals have been on show in Orkney....
Pupils from Dounby Primary School were involved, and have curated part of the exhibition including their own rocks which they chose for various reasons including….. ‘Because my Nani gave it to me.” Local artist Sheila Fleet cut and polished these rocks to bring out their qualities. Unfortunately my pics were out of focus and wouldn’t do justice to the stones – you’ll just have to go and see them for yourself!
As part of the ‘Dounby Rocks’ project pupils captured beautiful photographs of Ted Kellock’s thin section rockslides and these images are now available for purchase as greeting cards, both at the Museum and through their online shop. 50% of the profits will support Dounby School, with the remaining 50% benefiting Stromness Museum…
The exhibition includes a fabric which was designed by Kirsten Stewart, using paintings which the pupils produced inspired by the microscopic photos of Ted Kellock’s rocks slides……
We then went upstairs to the Natural History section, where there are more of Ted Kellock’s rock samples in the top drawer of a cabinet…
In the Museum’s permanent collection, an acknowledgment of the work of Hugh Miller…….
….and an impressive lump of Haematite!
Aligned with Geology is Palaeontology, and a fine selection of fossils……
I realised that I was in danger of taking far too many pictures – so I stopped!
The summer exhibition and the permanent collection weave together, and are well worth a visit.
The summer exhibition is available to view in the museum until Thursday 31st October.
https://stromnessmuseum.org.uk/
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