Finding the point of a museum in the dark

I love a good museum and hate bad ones.

My wife and I toured England and Scotland, braving crazy traffic to drive a large portion of the country to see as many museums and castles as possible. We had our list of “must see” places and a list of “if we have time” locations.

Overall, it was a fantastic vacation with many grand adventures. Too many to write about in a single My Turn column.

Some of the museums we visited, we had wanted to see for years. I wanted to see Buckland Abbey near Plymouth since I was a kid. I read about Sir Francis Drake and thought of him as a hero. The Spanish in the 16th century wouldn’t agree, but he did circle the world in a very small sailing ship and helped defend England from the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Buckland Abbey was built in 1278 by monks. The long house, they stored harvested food in, remains intact. Years later Sir Richard Grenville bought the former abbey and turned it into a home, which he sold to Drake. I read it was turned into a museum to them and always wanted to see it.

I did. It was great. The National Trust did wonders in restoring the buildings, but it was light on history. There was information about the monks, nothing about Grenville and barely anything on Drake. Yes, his drum is there, but that was it. The rest of the displays were items commemorating his accomplishments after his death.

It was disappointing not to see more about a childhood hero.

As we travelled through England, from Plymouth to Portsmouth to Nottingham to Leeds to York and onto Scotland, I found a troubling trend in the museums. Many of them are dark — as in too dark to see the artifacts on display.

I understand how sunlight damages delicate fabrics from hundreds of years ago. I do. But with our technology, I wondered why they haven’t found a light capable of showing the historical items without the harmful bits of light.

The Cotehele House was built in 1485 and is the least-altered home of its era. Inside are walls covered with tapestries, beds with amazing embroidery, and paintings. There are no lights in the building. No flash photography is allowed. The only illumination is from windows. It was very dark. It was almost bumping-into-furniture dark.

Then a guide pointed out how lucky were to see it on a rainy day. When it’s sunny, they shutter the windows to protect the fabrics. I assure you, it is completely dark when they do.

The Jorvik Viking Center in York was listed as a collection of “an incredible 40,000 objects.” But after you finish the amusement ride through a fake version of the 10th century Viking city, you get to see about 50 items, all in very dark cases. Too dark to see much. A case with Viking footwear looked suspiciously like someone’s crumpled-up, muddy tennis shoes. We had to take their word they were authentic.

The trend makes it hard to see incredible pieces of history, the kind you travel eight time zones — half the world — to see. I prefer our Grant County Historical Museum with a well-lit collection of our local recent history. If we can’t see it today in order to save it, perhaps they should have taken a photo, put it in a book, then thrown the item back into the dark place where they found it. It would have saved us a trip.

Bill Stevenson is the Columbia Basin Herald managing editor. He is a self-professed geek about history.