A couple of treats today. Firstly, I got a sneaky peek at the new Moor Stories website. It’s starting to come together and looks really good. Secondly I got a disc of images by Dave Garner of Harry Hems objects. Dave Garner is a superb photographer and has been taking pictures of RAMM’s objects for many years. He originally photographed the Hems collection as black and white transparencies, now we’ve got him back to take new digital images in glorious colour. The Hems collection is one of the most important in RAMM and so it is very useful to have good images of it. We should be able to use many of them in the Moor Stories project.
The images that immediately stood out were some of the roof bosses. A roof boss is the decorative piece of carving used to cover the joints between beams on a barrel vaulted ceiling. Most of the RAMM roof bosses have swirling leaf or floral designs. They are quite chunky pieces of carving as they were positioned high up in the church roof and had to be visible from the floor. Originally these pieces would have been brightly painted, now all but a few tiny traces of this paint has gone and they are a uniform brown varnish colour.