PERTH MUSEUM: PRESENTS THE STONE OF SCONE BEAUTIFULLY (AND NOT FAR FROM A GIANT SALMON)
At the centre of Perth’s £27 million new museum – repurposing its overbearing Edwardian city hall, with four bully-boy putti galumphing above a classical façade – there is a curatorial conundrum that weighs approximately 335lb. The Stone of Destiny, or Stone of Scone, is the star item in the public collection of Perth and Kinross, which also includes, among half a million miscellaneous objects and specimens, Late Neolithic carved stone balls, a Bronze Age log-boat, medieval horse-bone ice skates, and a 17th-century silk-and-satin slashed doublet (probably made for a wedding, and in rare, remarkable condition).
For more than half a millennium, the stone – kept, long ago, at Perthshire’s Scone Abbey – has been used to crown British monarchs; last year, it returned to Westminster for the coronation of King Charles III.
Yet, despite its worn surface, and iron loops that probably predate the moment, in 1296, when it was carried to Westminster Abbey at the behest of King Edward I of England, this oblong sandstone block – which, scholars now believe, was originally the threshold of an important ancient building, perhaps a nearby Roman fort – is, to look at, a boring lump of rock. How, then, to present something so enigmatic and visually “underwhelming”, as one of Perth Museum’s curators put it to me, so that visitors can appreciate its magic?
The solution, dreamed up by Dutch architects Mecanoo, is to present it within a towering, treasury-like oak-clad pavilion, constructed in the middle of the museum. Now, like a jewel within a setting, the dramatically lit stone – back in Perthshire for the first time in 728 years – emanates an aura of preciousness. An “immersive” introduction in an antechamber outlines its history, including the notorious moment, on Christmas Day 1950, when four Scottish students removed it from Westminster Abbey.
Otherwise, Mecanoo’s interventions are relatively straightforward and light-touch: the hall’s raked seating has been stripped away, the old entrance sealed off, and a corridor-like “vennel” (an old Scots word for an alley), paved with Scottish whinstone and with new bronze doorways at either end, now runs laterally across this building in which Winston Churchill once spoke, offering an accessible way in and out. A vast natural diorama occupies what was the organ loft.
Around the central pavilion, 2,500 objects from the permanent collection are arranged chronologically, providing a social history of the local area; throughout, the execution feels appealing and up-to-date. Several galleries are reserved for temporary exhibitions, including the inaugural show, a breezy cultural history of that emblem of Scottish royalty, the unicorn.
The old museum, where many of the objects were formerly installed, is now styled, simply, Perth Art Gallery, and has just opened a permanent display devoted to the Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson and his partner, the dancer and choreographer Margaret Morris.
Most pleasingly, at the new museum, the collection’s eccentricity has been emphasised, not veiled. Certainly, in Westminster Abbey, where the Stone of Destiny was kept until 1996, it didn’t vie for attention with, say, an “intact”, 1,000-year-old egg, discovered in a midden in Perth High Street, or a fibreglass replica of a “monster salmon” – at 64lb, the heaviest salmon caught in Britain using a rod – landed, by former First World War nurse Georgina Ballantine, following a two-hour battle on the River Tay in 1922. But there’s something rather British and gloriously unconventional about the fact that it now does.
From March 30; perthmuseum.co.uk
2024-03-28T12:10:35Z dg43tfdfdgfd