... I popped to the local museum with a few Cromwell finds and it and attempted to donate them.
You would think it would be easy, they would show a bout of interest!! Nope.
Dead uninterested response, oh not another one, more paperwork. You'll have too make an appointment, you can't just walk in you know!!
Those were the exact words, wouldn't even look at my bits. I wouldn't go back there even if I found the Crown jewels sod them. I've got it in my hand right now!
- Not surprised at all, mate. Sadly. I have a number of friends whose work involves various local museums and I keep hearing similar complaints from them all the time - many curators seem to have forgotten what museums are for, and regard the job as some kind of entitlement in return for which their only obligations are to open up and lock up at either end of the day.
Have you tried the County Archaeologist? (probably yours is in Norwich). I found our local bloke incredibly helpful when I brought in a bunch of stuff I found digging the garden - I got all excited, because the tiles, plaster etc I was finding, looked Roman (and Roman burials have been found less than a hundred yards up the road). Anyway, he got a microscope out, had a peer through it at this and that, showed me the various inclusions in the clay and lime matrices, and proved to me they were all 18thC. Turns out our house is built on part of the site of a much larger gaff built by a retired East India Company general, in the classical, Roman style popular at the time... then told me he'd be happy to see anything else I dug up, just in case it turned out to be Roman, since apart from grave goods found with the burials, no other Roman stuff had turned up in the locality (so I did, and now it has)
. Got to be worth a try - you may et just another jobsworth, but then again, like me, you might be very pleasantly surprised.
Badger.
