Saturday 28 April 2012

Ecosal Meeting at Bournemouth

Group photo of a visit to the Waterfront Museum, Poole to meet Clare Randall and look at the museum exhibits. Members of Ecosal visiting were myself, Renato Neves, Portugal; Belen Escobar, Spain;  Benoit Poitevin, France; and Mark Brisbane, Michael Fradley, Bournemouth University.
The team also met with Roger Herbert, ecologist at Bournemouth University who has been working on bio-diversity and habitat surveys of salines as part of the Ecosal research agenda.

Clare Randall, Renato Neves, Belen Escobar, Benoit Poitevin, Mark Brisbane, Michael Fradley
As well as holding business meetings about the development of the Ecosal network the group visited Brownsea Island, Poole Harbour, St Barbes Museum and Lymington salt marshes.

During my flight down to Bournemouth from Manchester the plane flew over salt marshes at the Solent end of the Beaulieu River in Hampshire, and on the return journey over the area known as Ashton and Neumans Flashes at Northwich, Cheshire where rock salt mines collapsed in the nineteenth century and were later infilled with lime waste to create present day habitats for wading birds and is the home of calcarious grassland loving species such as the Dingy Skipper not otherwise to be found in Cheshire.
The Lion Salt Works is in the village of Marston, middle right of the picture on the Trent and Mersey Canal, which can also be seen.

Beaulieu River, looking north. Salt marshes at the mouth of the river where it enters The Solent. 

Ashton and Neumans Flashes, Northwich, looking north west.


Wednesday 18 April 2012

Salt Making at Newlyn Art Gallery

19 - 20 May, 2012    8pm to 8am

A&A Fielding will be leading a salt making demonstration at the Nelwyn Art Gallery over the night of 19 May as part of the Museum's Museums at Night project.   culture24 link

Cat Gibbard the Education Officer has been working with different groups looking at salt as a theme.
Work throughout the night with Amanda Lorens to create an animation of tales in a salt landscape. To sustain our audience and participants there will be a variety of fruits from the sea, from the edible to the aural available, including a series of salty tales, told throughout the night. The Studio Cafè Bar will be open from 5pm until 12midnight serving Margaritas and a range of tasty morsels.




There will also be information about the project to create a route of traditional salt making linking sites in Portugal, Spain, France and the UK.

Young people will be creating new work in the space during a two week programme exploring the science, mythology and importance of salt and the processes by which it is extracted from the sea.