Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge

We went up to Cambridge for a bit of Shakespeare, and discovered that the Fitzwilliam Museum, in fact just about every museum, was closed on a Monday - but the geology museum was open. 

What a revelation, just the sort of old-fashioned museum with handwritten labels and cupboards and drawers and vitrines and quirky things that I love.

Professor Adam Sedgwick's walking boots

The obligatory dinosaur

Rocks and fossils large(ish) ...

... and small

Dinosaur bones and ammonites...

... and starfish ....

... and sea-lilies (crinoids)

Microfossils - how do they even find them?

A quiet room with chemical explanations

Fog oak- "Part of a tree found March 1839
near the Reach in Mildenhall Fen at 7 feet from the surface
by men digging for clay. Its head pointed west by north.
Height with its branches 250 feet.
Height to the first branch 159 feet."

The all-too-familiar touristy view of The Backs and Kings College Chapel. Living in Cambridge in the 1970s, I used to cycle from the Sidgwick site, through the gate [now shut] at lunchtime to the market. (The site (departmental buildings) was named after the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who studied at Cambridge in the 19th century.)

 Across the road is the Fellows' Garden, or is it the Master's Garden -

 It's big.

The evening wasn't particularly warm, and the actors, as night fell, weren't easy to hear. There was a lot of rushing about, if only to get on "stage". No doubt the tower of the University Library has seen stranger things -

The Mathematical Bridge of Queen's College, on the way back to the station -

 ps - what delight to happen upon a labyrinthine sculpture (Between the Lines, by Peter Randall Page), which set off my labyrinthine trousers -