27.7.16 Yesterday Caroline Davison, the Director of Norfolk Archaeological Trust, showed us round St Benet’s Abbey (a ruined Benedictine monastery) and told us about the architectural connections between this 10th century monastery and churches with round towers found in Denmark. The Abbey was built on a mound by the River Bure in the heart of the Broads and even today is a bit inaccessible by road, but easily reached by boat. It brought home to us the importance of water as conduit for social, cultural, political and historical communication and exchange in earlier times. Caroline said that due to this Norfolk would have had closer ties with Denmark than the rest of England. Caroline has sent us some articles to read about the history of the architecture of the Abbey and a geo-physics report . She has also suggested a new contact to make with regard to the sharing of architectural design between Norfolk and Denmark. The site of St Benet’s Abbey still seems to resonate with the activity that has occurred there over the centuries, whilst maintaining an air of gravity and peace. It was wonderful to have our own guide and we would like to thank Caroline very much for the time she gave us and for making our visit so inspiring and informative.
We are delighted and also a little overwhelmed by the amount of responses we have received to our email asking for interested parties to contact us!
People have been so generous in offering to share their skill, knowledge, creativity and TIME, and we would like to say a big public thank you to them all!
We have several artists from Norfolk on our database now who we intend to have a brainstorming session with on our return from Denmark. We have guided visits arranged to sites in East Anglia and meetings arranged with professional archaeology experts in England. We have meetings arranged with a curator at Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus and a senior researcher at the National Museum in Copenhagen, and all that has happened in the last week. So watch this space!!!!
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Place-names, church dedications, archaeological finds, even the street pattern – all these give clues to where the Danes lived and worked. A thousand years ago, Norwich was a truly Anglo-Scandinavian town. http://www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk/home
We have arranged a meeting, to discuss our project and the museums artefacts, with the senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Today I emailed 12 organisations in Central Jutland and 12 in East Anglia today to continue creating a network of archaeologists and artists across these two regions. Really looking forward to getting some more responses.
We have also started to research artefacts from the Viking period that have attracted us because of their portable nature and their links to both Norfolk and Denmark. This has led to us considering expanding our timescale to include Saxon and Iron Age artefacts as well as we have found some very interesting creative links from this earlier period that we feel warrant further investigation. As it is early days for us we have decided to keep an open mind .
Trains and flights to Aarhus are booked as is airbnb. We are getting excited!
