#buxton-museum — Public Fediverse posts

Put It Back

Years ago, at the yard where I kept my horses, an old outbuilding gave up something a little bit unexpected.

A dried cat.

I don’t know exactly how old the building was. I believe it may have once been part of a row of terraced cottages that had otherwise been demolished, but I have never established that firmly enough to state it is fact. Nor can I now prove that the cat had been placed their deliberately. Mostly because… well, cats are cats. They chase mice, they crawl into holes, they investigate places from which they later discover they can’t get out. Sometimes, they hide away because it’s their time to die. So finding the naturally mummified remains of a cat inside an old building does not automatically mean somebody put it there to ward off witches.

Nevertheless, I remembered it. Because finding a dead cat preserved within the fabric of an old building is not something you easily forget.

Then, years later, I met another one. This time, I was volunteering at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery.

In early January 2017, renovation work was taking place at the former Post Office in the Quadrant in Buxton. During the work, the workmen disturbed part of the ceiling. And a dried cat fell out. Literally, it just dropped from the ceiling cavity during the work.

The owner of the building, Maxine Chuwen, saved it being thrown into the skip and eventually took it to the museum. I can vaguely remember it arriving. By then I’d already encountered one dried cat in an old building. Now someone walked into the museum with another. This one subsequently became part of the museum collection as DERSB:2017.1, it was cleaned and stabilised, researched and eventually, displayed. Since then, it has made it’s way into the archaeological history on something I think is absolutely wonderful.

Magical House Protection.

Welcome back to Old Magic. Pull up a chair…

When you start dismantling old British houses, occasionally you find things that have absolutely no business being where they are.

A single child shoe inside a wall…

A bottle beneath a hearth…

Marks carved beside a fireplace…

A horse skull underneath a floor…

A bundle of clothing above a ceiling…

A dried cat in a roof.

Sometimes, several objects appear together, and once archaeologists started to record where these things were found, an intriguing pattern emerged. They frequently occur at the vulnerable parts of buildings – chimneys, hearths and doors. Windows, roofs and floors. Thresholds. The places where the outside world could get in.

For people living in a world inhabited by witches, fairies, spirits, demons, illness, bad luck and things that went bump in considerably less metaphorical nights, a house was more than shelter. It was a boundary. Inside was us, outside was everything else. And boundaries needed protecting.

Let’s start with the shoes, because there are an extraordinary number of them. So many in fact, that Northampton Museum and Art Gallery maintains a ‘Concealed Shoe Index’, established by footwear historian June Swann, recording shoes discovered deliberately hidden within the buildings. They have been found in chimneys and behind fireplaces. Under floorboards and inside walls. Above ceilings and around doors and windows. Sometimes there’s a pair but very often there isn’t, just one worn shoe. Adult shoes, children’s shoes, boots, slippers – footwear that somebody could apparently have thrown away, but chose instead to place somewhere very difficult to retrieve.

The practice is particularly fascinating because we have the physical evidence but very little contemporary explanation from the people who actually did it. Nobody seems to have thought:

“I’d better write down why I’ve Just bricked up Ethel’s left shoe in the chimney in case somebody finds it in 250 years…”

They just did it. And that silence has left researchers with several theories.

Perhaps a worn shoe retained something of the person who had worn it – this would fit very well with the magical logic that we’ve already encountered this week. A shoe gradually takes on the shape of it’s owner. It contains the impression of the foot. It is intensely individual. Perhaps it functioned as a substitute for the person. Perhaps it attracted or trapped something harmful. Perhaps it brought luck or protected the household. Perhaps different people concealed shoes for different reasons – we don’t know. Old Magic is full of wonderfully neat explanations invented long after the people performing the ritual had stopped explaining themselves. But the honest answer is sometimes considerably more interesting:

Somebody thought that this mattered. We just don’t know precisely what they thought it did.

The earliest examples stretch right back into the medieval period, while the practice continued for centuries afterwards. By the time researchers began seriously recording concealed footwear, examples had turned up across Britain and much further afield. One nineteenth century child’s shoe in Northampton’s collection was discovered in a ground floor ceiling beneath a beam. A single little shoe, hidden where nobody was supposed to see it.

The there are the bottles.

The so-called witch bottle is perhaps easier to interpret because some historical accounts actually describe the practice. From around the seventeenth century, bottles and jars could be filled with combinations of urine, pins, nails. thorns, teeth, hair, nail clippings and other materials. Sometimes they were heated, sometimes burned, sometimes buried. Sometimes they were concealed beneath hearths, thresholds or floors.

The logic was counter-magic. If someone believed they had been bewitched, bodily material from the victim could be placed inside the bottle alongside sharp objects. The magical connection between witch and victim could supposedly be exploited in reverse. The witch who had reached into the house magically could be hurt through that connection.

Other bottles appear to have functioned more generally as protective deposits. Again, the location matters. The hearth, chimney and doorways were openings. The threshold marked the precise place where outside became inside. Put protection there and maybe whatever was outside stayed outside.

Sometimes the protection wasn’t hidden at all. Look closely at old buildings and you may find curious marks scratched or carved into the timber or stone. Intersecting circles. Daisy wheel or hexafoil designs. Repeated V’s. Mesh like patterns and burn marks. These are often described as ‘apotropaic marks’ from a word meaning something intended to turn away or avert harm. They occur around fireplaces, doors, windows and other openings with suspicious frequency.

Historic England’s public survey of these so-called witches’ marks generated hundreds of reports and one of Britain’s most spectacular concentrations was discovered somewhere very familiar to Derbyshire readers.

Creswell Crags.

The caves on the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border contain an extraordinary collection of marks interpreted as protective, including numerous designs around holes and crevices. Places something might emerge. Once again: boundary. Opening. Protection.But houses sometimes contain rather larger surprises.

Like horses. Or at least their heads.

Horse skulls have been discovered beneath floors and within walls in Britain and Ireland and their interpretation is complicated.

Some appear to have been deliberately deposited. In Ireland particularly, there is a longstanding explanation that horse skulls placed beneath floors improved the resonance for music and dancing. In other contexts, researchers have suggested ritual or protective meanings. The two explanations need not necessarily apply to every find – that is another useful warning. Finding an unusual object hidden in a building doesn’t automatically make it magical. Context is everything.

Which brings us back to the cats.

Dried or naturally mummified cats have been discovered in old buildings across Britain. Some may simply be unfortunate animals that crawled into cavities while hunting rodents and never escaped. Others are considerably harder to explain that way. Cats have been found in sealed locations. Some appear to have been deliberately positioned. There are even reported examples associated with rats or mice in arrangements suggesting that the animals were already dead when placed there.

Various explanations have been proposed. Perhaps the cat symbolically continued hunting vermin. Perhaps it protected the household. Perhaps it deterred supernatural intruders. Perhaps the animal itself had some apotropaic significance.

Again, nobody left us the instruction manual.

And that is why I’m cautious about my first cat. I saw it. I know it came from an old outbuilding. But without knowing enough about the precise building, its date and the exact context in which the cat was found, I can’t tell you that somebody deliberately put it there. It might have been Old Magic. It might have just been an unlucky cat.

The Buxton cat is more intriguing.

The building in The Quadrant dates from the nineteenth century, and the cat was found in a ceiling cavity during restoration. Newspapers dating from the 1890s were reportedly found in the same general space, although that does not prove that the cat was deposited at the same time. It is now catalogued among documented British examples of dried cats discovered within buildings.

And here’s the part I particularly love. These traditions didn’t necessarily end when we stopped believing in them.

Because sometimes modern people find these objects. And put them back.

During renovations begun in 2012 at a historic building in Gatehouse of Fleet in Scotland, three individual children’s shoes were discovered hidden in separate walls. The owners researched them. They learned about the tradition of concealed shoes. They registered their finds with the Concealed Shoe Index. Then the building was converted into three houses. And they put one shoe back into each house. They hoped the shoes would continue to bring luck.

Think about what has just happened there.

A ritual is performed. Its original meaning is forgotten. Centuries pass. The building is opened.

Modern people discover the objects. They research the lost ritual. And then they perform it again.

The tradition has effectively resurrected itself.

Research into concealed footwear has found this reaction repeatedly. People discover an old shoe and feel strangely uncomfortable about simply throwing it away.

Some give it to a museum.

Some display it.

Some keep it near the place where it was found.

And some put it straight back into the wall.

Research on concealed deposits records June Swann’s observation that English finders often instinctively returned shoes to their original locations. Some reportedly became genuinely uneasy at the thought of the shoe leaving the building, as though removing it might also remove whatever protection it had provided. And I completely understand them.

Imagine it.

You’re renovating your house. You remove some plaster and behind it is a tiny, worn child’s shoe. Nobody has seen it for perhaps two hundred years. You discover that people once hid shoes inside houses, possibly for protection or luck. You are a rational twenty-first-century human being. You do not believe that witches enter through chimneys. You do not believe malevolent spirits lurk behind the skirting board. You do not believe a battered old shoe has spent two centuries standing supernatural guard over the spare bedroom. Obviously.

So you throw it away.

Do you?

Because the moment somebody tells you that the shoe may have been protecting the house for two hundred years, another tiny voice appears.

“It’s not hurting anything. It belongs there. Why risk it?”

And suddenly the plasterboard is going back up with the shoe behind it. That may be the most beautiful example of Old Magic we’ve found yet. Not because an eighteenth-century family believed in magical protection, we expect people in the past to have beliefs different from ours. What fascinates me is the modern hand putting the object back. The person who knows the history, knows the archaeology, knows there is no demonstrable mechanism by which an old shoe can protect a building from supernatural attack. And still thinks:

“Leave it where it was.”

Maybe that isn’t belief exactly.

Maybe it’s respect. An unwillingness to break a chain. Maybe old objects acquire authority simply by surviving. Maybe knowing that another human being deliberately placed something there centuries ago makes removing it feel intrusive.

Or maybe, beneath all our electric lights, central heating, video doorbells and home insurance policies, the old magical map of the house still makes a peculiar kind of emotional sense.

There is inside. There is outside. There are openings between them and we want the things we love to be safe. So we lock the door. Check the windows. Leave a light on.

Hang something beside the entrance. Keep particular objects because they make the house feel right.

And if we discover that somebody long dead left something inside the wall to protect the place?

Well.

Maybe it can stay.

I’ve encountered two dried cats from old buildings in my lifetime. One remains a mystery. The other fell out of a Buxton ceiling in 2017 and ended up in the museum where I was volunteering. Neither proves that every dried cat in every roof was deliberately concealed. Neither gives us a neat explanation for why people placed animals, shoes, bottles and other objects inside buildings. But together with thousands of other discoveries, they remind us that our ancestors sometimes constructed houses with more than timber, stone and plaster.

They built beliefs into them. Protection beneath the floor, luck inside the wall, warnings beside the door and something watching the chimney. Most of it was never meant to be seen again.

Until somebody renovates the kitchen.

So if you live in an old house and one day the builder calls you over with a peculiar expression and something dusty in his hand, take a photograph. Record exactly where it came from. Don’t immediately assume it’s witchcraft, find out what you’ve actually got. And whatever you do, treat it with respect. Then decide what happens next.

Museum? Display case? Back inside the wall?

I know what plenty of perfectly sensible people have chosen.

They put it back.

And between you and me?

I probably would too.

Buxton Museum – From Closure to New Beginnings

Pull up a chair and let me put the kettle on, because this is one of those stories that feels close to home in more ways than one – Buxton has a way of doing that, doesn’t it? The mist rolling down over the hills, the limestone underfoot, the sense that if you dig even a little you will find something older than you expected. Sometimes a fossil, sometimes a story, and sometimes, if you are very lucky, something shaped by human hands thousands of years ago.

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery has always been the place where all those different layers come together. Not in a grand, untouchable way, but in that quietly fascinating, slightly eccentric way that local museums do so well. You could walk in out of the Derbyshire drizzle and find yourself standing in the middle of 360 million years of history, from ancient seas to Roman roads to the tools of people who once walked these same hills with flint in their hands and purpose in their stride.

The museum itself has roots deep in the late nineteenth century, when Buxton was not only a spa town but a place of folklore, culture and curiosity. Like many civic museums of the Victorian and Edwardian era, it was born from the idea that knowledge should be shared, that history and science should not belong solely to scholars but to everyone. Its long time home in the Peak Buildings on Terrace Road became a kind of anchor point for that vision, holding collections that told the story of the Peak District in all its strange and beautiful complexity.

And what a story that is.

The Peak is one of the richest prehistoric landscapes in Britain, a place where Mesolithic hunters once tracked game through woodland that no longer exists, where Neolithic communities raised monuments that still puzzle us, and where Bronze Age burials quietly mark the passing of lives long forgotten. The museum’s archaeological collections have always been central to telling that story, and tucked within them, the lithics collection carries a particular kind of magic. I know this because I, along with my good friend Bob, were once part of the team that sorted them.

There is something about lithics that stops you in your tracks. These are not decorative objects or curiosities. They are tools, shaped with intent, held in real hands, used in moments of survival. When you handle them, even through gloves and careful procedure, there is a flicker of connection. The angle of a blade, the precision of a strike, the quiet evidence of skill passed from one generation to another. The work of curation – sorting, cataloguing and understanding museum artefacts – is meticulous and often unseen, but it is the foundation on which everything else is built. Without that work, the stories remain silent.

Over the years, the museum grew into something much broader than a simple collection of ‘things’. It became a place that told the entire story of the Peak District, from deep geological time through to modern social history. Visitors could move through the corridors from fossils and Blue John stone to Roman jewellery, medieval relics and the industrial heritage that shaped the town itself. It was a place where everything connected if you took the time to look.

A turning point came in 2017 with the redevelopment of the Wonders of the Peak gallery, a project that brought new life and energy into the museum. Funded in part by Arts Council England, it transformed the way the collections were displayed, making them more immersive, more accessible and more engaging for a wider audience. Suddenly, this quiet local museum was drawing over 30,000 visitors a year, hosting exhibitions, workshops and even collaborations with institutions like the British Museum. There was a sense that little old Buxton’s story was not just local after all, but part of something much, much bigger.

The museum also began to shift in how it invited people in. Gone was the stuffy, old fashioned sense that everything must be observed at a distance. In its place came a more hands on approach, encouraging curiosity, exploration and connection. Families, researchers, school groups and the simply curious all found something to hold onto there, whether literally or figuratively.

And then, as so often happens with buildings that have stood a long time, reality intervened. Structural concerns with the Peak Buildings led to the museum’s closure in 2023. It is difficult to overstate how much that changed things. This was not just a case of locked doors. It was the temporary loss of a space that had quietly held the town’s memory for generations.

Behind the scenes, an enormous amount of work began almost immediately. Over 100,000 objects had to be carefully packed, documented and moved into secure storage. Each one handled with the same care it had received on display, perhaps more so, because now it had to endure uncertainty. Staff adapted, shifting their focus to outreach and temporary displays, with Buxton Library becoming a kind of lifeline for keeping the museum’s presence alive in the community.

The community, for its part, did not stay quiet.

In 2024, hundreds of people turned out in support of the museum, a reminder that this was never just a place tourists visited but something woven into everyday life. When a museum like this closes, even temporarily, it leaves a gap you can feel.

Now, in 2026, the story is shifting again, and there is a cautious sense of movement. Funding from Arts Council England has supported plans for a new temporary home near Buxton Library, with exhibition spaces, a shop and areas for activities and education. It is not a permanent solution, but it is a vital step, a way of bringing the collections back into public view and restoring that connection between people and place.

At the same time, Derbyshire County Council has committed to finding a permanent new location within the town centre as part of wider regeneration plans. It is an ambitious goal, and one that will take time. There are practical challenges, funding considerations and the delicate balance of honouring what the museum has always been while allowing it to evolve into something that can serve future generations.

Public consultation has become a key part of that process, with residents invited in 2026 to help shape what the museum should look like and how it should function. That feels fitting. This has always been a shared space, built not just by curators and councils but by the people who visit, contribute and care about it.

There are still questions, of course. Timelines are uncertain, and the move to a permanent home may take several years. Temporary arrangements will bridge that gap, and there will likely be moments of frustration along the way. But what stands out most is not uncertainty, but resilience.

Even now, the work continues. Collections are being researched, conserved and understood in quiet rooms rather than public galleries. Stories are still being pieced together. Knowledge is still growing.

And somewhere, carefully wrapped and waiting, are those lithics. Silent, patient, carrying the imprint of lives lived thousands of years ago. The fact that they have been handled, sorted and interpreted by people who care deeply about them adds another layer to their story. It becomes a chain of connection, from the original maker to the modern curator, from ancient landscape to present day Buxton.

When the museum opens its doors again, whether in a temporary space or a new permanent home, it will not simply be returning to what it was. It will be stepping into something new, shaped by everything it has been through and by the people who refused to let it fade quietly away.

And if you stand there, looking at a piece of worked flint under soft gallery lights, you might just feel it. That sense of continuity. Of hands across time. Of stories waiting patiently to be told again.