In the beginning

In the beginning…

This is the beginning of a journey. In some ways it feels like walking into the unknown - in others, a return to things that have always been familiar. During my previous decade as Curator of the Armitt Museum here in Ambleside, I learned much about change and contingency, primarily through the items in my care. These were objects which had come to us through a variety of routes. What they shared was the principle that someone, at some time, had valued them and wished to give them a future. Now, as museum artifacts, dislocated from their origins they had altered, developed new significance and associations – the ability to shift and slide.

An article by Francis Gooding in the London Review of Books (10.02.2022) about a recent exhibition at the British Museum Peru: A Journey in Time, explained how historically in Andean culture, perception of time was quite different from our own, represented not by a continuous relentless flow, but by three simultaneous strands or realities. Future and past generations were as fully alive in Andean time, living on with the same immediacy as we do in our present. Things and places could move between the strands, be present in more than one and forge connections between them. This seemed familiar as, of course, no one lives entirely in the present. Our thoughts move seamlessly between past, present and imagined future. Listening to interviews from the Ambleside Oral History Archive, I had a sense of how powerfully the sound of a voice can resurrect memory. They could have been those of my grandparents or great aunts or the old man down the road who lost his leg in the Great War. They were the voices of people I had known - as disconcerting in their familiarity as in their absence.

This adventure is unashamedly about the local, about a sense of place and a sense of being in that place, in its past, present and future – simultaneously.

Deborah Walsh15 March 2022