 Can you hear me back? Good! Excellent! It was at one of the society's Christmas parties when Adrian James told me that in the archives there was a collection of photographs of castles taken by T. Lawrence. So the next time that was in, I asked to see them. There have been given to the society some time ago by his younger brother, Professor Anne Lawrence, a fellow of this society, along with many of his own photographs. They were still in a couple of packets. Those in a second packet were of a rather better quality, As I have subsequently found out, they have been treated for Laurence's mother, Sarah, after his death. There are about 70 different images in all and seven duplicates of many evil architecture in France with a couple of jerseys. At first sight, they were not very significant, and to confuse things further, several of the Prince turned out to be reversed. But when I started to put them into context with who had taken them and why, they seemed to be a collection worth investigating. So, under the guidance of Heather Rowland, who has been so instrumental in getting the society's collections unlocked, and with great assistance from the library staff, particularly Magda, we got them into archival sleeves, and with some very useful advice from fellows, I said about trying to catalog them. During his childhood, Laurence acquired a deep interest in medieval archaeology, and particularly castles. He explored it actively in England and Wales. In the summer of 1906, aged 18 and stirred school, he made the first cycling tours in France, looking at castles and sun churches, mostly in Normandy and Brittany. He did not have a camera then, so he brought postcards whenever he could. We doubt some of his postcards. They are mostly quite clear, and in some cases, they seem to have more architectural details in them than many modern postcards. He also recorded his impressions in some graphic letters home, which got published after his death. For a tour the following summer, he borrowed his father's camera, a big camera, in which he must have been using shoot film. The camera was a big field camera, which was later given to the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford Street. They very kindly got it out of off-site storage for me to see recently. A field camera could be folded into a case, but the total weight was still over three and a half kilos. On top of that, he was carrying a tripod, but very little else in the way of a change of clothing. There is an opportunity that I can't reconcile. Most of our photographs appear to be in contact prints or look like it, but the camera plate size or film size of your using it is slightly smaller than most of these prints. I welcome any discussion upstairs afterwards about that. To save film and time, he continued to buy postcards whenever he could. Most of his photographs were just of architectural details. These are some examples from his 1907 tour, which is again in the North of Wales. When he visited Shuttle Gaia, the castle that King Richard I built on the road of sale to defend his Normandy possessions, he wrote home that the castle was so magnificent and the postcards were so bad that he stayed there an extra day and took ten photographs. We have all ten of these, though some are not very good. These two are of the great star. I don't think he ever gained trying to take so many photographs at one site. He was very enthusiastic about Fougere and Brittany, placing it among the very best that he had seen. He had made a plan of it a previous year, while feasting on black barriers in the otherwise empty castle. Now he was able to take four quite good photographs, of which this is one. The print we have was a reverse view, which I have corrected here. In addition to that, I have fiddled a bit with the contrast in some of his photographs, but of course what you are seeing was all actually within the print. He had thoroughly explored the castle at La Hulindai in 1906 and wrote a long description of the bend, including how he had climbed along legends in the dark towers. Feed him for details. He took three photographs at this time to a hill, but until now they were mislabelled even when published in a book of his letters. All his photographs of religious architecture are of interior details, often structure, in which he had a particular interest. He obviously couldn't resist photographing this lowly water student in a church in Brittany. I think he would make a marvelous chess man in his easy digital age, but certainly to think of the complexities of using a fake camera at that time. He wrote that he had spent three hours focusing on the rude screaming in a church at La Bale, presumably in rather poor light. The result is one of his finest pictures. He went to Mont Saint-Michel, but he only took some photographs in the choices. He wrote that he was horrified with the exterior. In the autumn of 1907, Lawrence began studying history at Oxford University, and by the following summer, he had decided to write a thesis based on his study of medieval castles. In order to gain extra material for this, his 1908 tour covered a considerable distance cycling around France from the north to the Mediterranean and back. He covered some 2,400 miles on a bicycle which had an especially high top gear that had been made for him by Mr Morris of Oxford. Three days before he started from the heart, the 1908 tour to France had started from Paris. They only did 300 miles more than Lawrence. They had a day off between each of the 15 stagings, and they weren't climbing around castles. As before, Lawrence was buying postcards whenever possible. But these are some of the photographs he took on that trip. Most were of castles like this of the great tower at Ornard, east of Paris, which he thought went with Chateau Gaillard in importance for his thesis, in spite of the upper part that he immediately built. As often elsewhere, he took pictures of some architectural details which did not feature on the postcards. It's a bit difficult to find which particular detail is interesting in. Sadly, his notebooks have not survived. Most of the photographs had pencil mirrors on the back saying what they were, which I assume were written later by Arnold Gluckers. This one just said, which appears to be presumably in France. By sheer good fortune, I was at a parcel conference in France last year. On our last afternoon, walking around the town walls of Torne, one of my colleagues said, Bill, isn't that Lawrence's tower? And so it was. Later on, I found that Lawrence had described it in a letter. On the walls is a square tower turned inside out and cut in half. Not a bad description. In fact, it's an odd arrangement of two buttresses, but we don't know what sort of platform might have been on top. Although it was not relevant to his thesis, he did not pass by religious architecture if it was worth a visit, such as Faisolet Abbey in Burgundy, which the guidebooks had told him was the grandest normal church in Europe. He wrote down that he found this superb, but in structure, rather than in proportions. The carvings were the finest early work he had met with it until then. He went on to spend a night at the castle of Cusole, overlooking the Rome Valley. He used three photographs there in his thesis, comparing the past with some crusader work that he later saw in the Levant, that he commented that these walls were very thin. He had a great deal of praise for the fortified city of Carcassonne in south-west France, and he bought some 40 postcards, most of which we have, and only took four photographs, one of which, that on the left, he said was the only pretty picture he had taken so far on that tour. He used it as the frontispiece for his thesis. He took a quite attractive feather of the gateway into the castle at Beautefort in the Dorau Inn, and wrote down that the butler had a shortened, I love that phrase, the butler had a shortened, that the castle had been burnt by the English in the time of Charles I, and almost rebuilt in the 17th century. The Lawrence was convinced that the entry arrangements were earlier and included a rough plan of these in his thesis. One of the photographs was completely unidentified. So at the small exhibition he held upstairs in the library, I offered a bottle of the antiquary whisky to the first fellow who could identify it. Approach, Dr Bob Byrne, the founder of the castle's study school, told me it was, shall you, a bit north of the Dorau Inn. When I told him, we had a fair, Lawrence's photograph, or shall I say, and it was nothing like. Bob had visited the castle, a chogel, in 1982, and it was from this castle that the crossbow bolt was fired, which mortally wounded King Richard I in 1199. Standing on the top of the tower on the left, it'd been re-topped since Lawrence's time, Bob had photographed a distant tower in the town that did not have time to go there. That tower, however, fell down in 1994, only a spot now remains, which made identification only possible by an internet search of old photographs. Our mystery castle was indeed a second castle, a chogel, a small castle built later in the town, shall you, Margaret. Lawrence described the site briefly in a letter from there, and she would have taken both photographs from the rock on which he thought King Richard might have been standing to keep his feet dry, when the crossbow bolt was fired. Probably from a now vanished outer tower on the right of the older castle on the left, shall you, chogel, towards the end of his trip. Lawrence was amazed by the shock of evil. He had expected to have been ruined by restoration and thought he could do it before breakfast. He spent the whole day there. He bought all the Christmas cards he could, and only took a few photographs of details. He thought that the small statuette of philosophers had it been a group marvel, there would have been photographs of him in every angle. He feared that his photographs of the Christchurch example would not be worth looking at, though it certainly is. And his overall description of the cathedral, which he found the newest building he had ever seen, is remarkable for a 20-year-old. Now, I've taken extracts from all of his letters and put them in a file which now live with Fettiglas up in the archives. To me, however, the most atmospheric photo was that taken halfway through this tour when he had reached a mod. The fortified town on the Mediterranean shore that the French kings of Louis used as a home base for his crusading fleet, and where Mosquefos gave Lawrence his first bound of malaria. It's not a particularly good photograph, but it's very evocative. As this was where Lawrence first came to the Mediterranean, which he wrote home, was the way to the south, and all the glorious is. And that, of course, was where life would be taken. When he got back to Oxford, thinking that he had enough material for his thesis, a friend of theirs, Nolan, suggested it would be even more interesting if he could compare what he had seen in Europe with the early architecture of the Crusades. So, in the summer of 1909, he did a strenuous ford in Lebanon and Syria, looking at castles. The resulting thesis, the influence that retains on European military architecture, to the end of the 12th century, helped him to earn the first task on his degree. Life then took him on to an archaeological deal in Syria, an exploration of the Sinai, eventually by military intelligence in Cairo to the Arab Revolt. After his death, his thesis was published under the symbol title of Crusader castles. There it contains many of its images from France, for all of which we have copies in our collection. Other than in a handful of photographs from other places, our collection does not follow him in later life. But what we have from France, while perhaps not a great archaeological significance, helps to build a picture of the mind of a remarkable young man who, if events have not taken him in a very different direction, might well become a distinguished archaeologist. Mr President, I think it's a collection that has been well worth unlocking, and Heather, this one's for you. Thanks for all you've done. Thank you for listening. My name is Alasen. I'm a third-year student at Wesleyan College near Chichester on the MA programme, and my major conservation project this year was the Society's Formula Wall Club, which I worked with my tutor, Malcolm Argeron, to conserve and document the object, which we've actually delivered back and set up today. It's a bit of a mystery story, really, this object. There's still a lot that we don't know about it. This evening I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about the globe, about its history, as far as we can tell, and the conservation work that we've carried out. So, first, just a little bit about what it actually is in case anybody hasn't seen it. Basically, as you saw on the title slide, it's an engraved terrestrial globe. It also has 24 hours marked by Roman numerals around the equator on a moving ring, and that's connected with a breaststrap to two other moving rings above and below the tropnids. The lower cap is engraved, as you can see here, and with a clock dial and the inscription showing that it was presented to the society by Benjamin Lewis Bullamy in 1850, and that was just four years before his death. The Bullamy family held the appointment of clockmakers to the Crown for 112 years from 1742 under Justin until Benjamin Lewis' death in 1854. As I'm sure many of you know, the Bullamy's are a famous and highly regarded family of clockmakers. So, that's quite an important piece of prominence for this object, and within the globe is this clock, which drives the hands on the dial to indicate the time and also strikes the hours and the halves. The going train has got a verge of scaling controlled by a sprung balance, and the striking is controlled by the catwyr, and it has this beautifully-pissed and sculpted gate-uping mechanism, which you can see on the right there. The craftsmanship on this clock really is fantastic. Every screw head is definitely turned, and every spring or popper is finely sculpted. The lead-up work to the outer rings is, unfortunately, mostly missing, but I'm going to talk more on that later. The clock was originally manufactured in France around the 1690, and it's undergone a series of modifications and losses throughout its existence. Everything about its existence before Bullamy presented it to the society is completely unknown, other than what we can deduce from its materiality. So, we don't know who made it, who it was made for, where it was before Bullamy had it, or, indeed, how it came to be in his possession. What we do know from Bullamy's notes that are held here in the collection is that the upper and lower portions of the map engraving were missing already by the time that he had it, and he replaced them with silver copper, of course, including the inscription on the dial on the south pole, which we just saw. A 1951 letter from the map room of the British Library, which appears here, suggests the engraved globe appears to have more in common with the maps of Pierre de Valle from the final quarter of the 17th century, but an American cartography expert Barry Ridderman favours a map by Giaio from 1691 as the source. The engraved map includes common cartography eras of the time, such as the phantoms at Matthew Island and the duplicate News and Hellermen, longitudely misplaced there. The features and basis of the map engraving, whether it's Giaio or de Valle, as well as certain features of the Cobb movement, place its initial construction in France circa 1690 to 1700, so that's where we get the date from. Now, as I'm sure you all know, clocks need some sort of power source to drive the gear trains, and this is most commonly either weights hanging from a rope or a gut line or a mainspring in a barrel. However, in this instance, and this is one of the unique features of this clock, though it's not the only known example of this, the clock is powered by its own weight. A single chain is hooked and partially wound around the going train barrel just under here, and that loops over this pulley, and which is mounted on this central rod and suspended from the outer frame. Crucially, the rod is not fixed to the clock. The chain goes over the pulley, and then is wound ground and hooked onto the other barrel, the striking train of gears. And remember that the clock is fixed to the inside of the globe case, so that weighs about 10 kilos. So the entire clock and the case are essentially hanging on that pulley and their combined weight pulls down on the chain, causing it to be gradually unwound from the barrels, and that rotates the barrels and causes the whole globe to gradually descend down the central rod. And quite geniously, as the clock runs, these little spring barrels here wound up so that when you come to wind it by lifting it back up the central shaft, the spring barrel then unwinds and takes up the sac on the chain, causing the chain to be rewound, because otherwise you would lift it and the chain would just flap around. So that's quite a clever way of dealing with that. The outer rings, here, here and here, these are the things that make this object truly unique. There's nothing out there that works quite like this. The rings, as you can see, are connected by the brass strap, and the case is constructed in four separate sections around the central cylinder, and the rings sit on top of their respective sections. So to give you an idea, this one here has got the top two sections taken off, and it looks top down, and this, so this is the middle ring looking from the top down, that ring there, and all of the rings have got roller wheels like these ones so that they can rotate around. This is the bottom ring, and you can see here that it's got a 366 tooth contract wheel going round the edge there, and that is how the drive is communicated to the rings. This drawing, by Willamie, shows a small wheel on the clock here, that's a contract wheel, and that meshes with an arbor here, and that arbor then has another wheel on the end which communicates the drive to this wheel, and because all the rings are connected, as that ring is driven, it takes the other ones round with it. Unfortunately, this contract wheel and this arbor, all of this deal of work, were lost some point after 1850, we don't know when. Now, it starts to get a bit interesting. According to Willamie's notes, the gearing arrangement results in the outer rings completing a full rotation in 24 hours, which kind of makes sense when you look at the tractor ring around it. Let's have a quick look at how that's driven. This is the motion work of the hands here, and a wheel behind that wheel, just there, meshes with this wheel just here, and that is on an arbor which goes through the plates to the back to that pinion there, which then engages with another pinion which engages with the contract wheel which then goes on to the rod and on to the outer wheel. Is that all lost? Because so will we. It's hard to follow, and it's a very roundabout way of doing it. That is all a bit kind of unnecessary, and we'll see why. The contract wheel was mounted loose on a square on the end of the second wheel arbor, which we can see just here. So this arbor comes out of the plate, and the contract wheel is mounted on that. But it's not driven by that arbor, it's driven by all of that other stuff that I just showed you. Now that second wheel actually rotates once every four hours, which is six times a day. So a very quick and simple calculation can tell you that you can just mount a single wheel on there and have it connected with two wheels that are exactly the same size, and the same job is done. You get the outer ring rotating once in 24 hours. So you don't need any of this stuff coming off and back up through the plates. It's all completely unnecessary. And when you start to look closer at the surviving parts of the lead-off work, we see a distinct difference in tooth form on the wheels, style of arbor's and build quality. And you can see on this wheel there's burrs on the back of the wheel from when they were cut. On the rest of the clock. And if we look closer at this second wheel arbor, where the contrary wheel is mounted, you can see there's a small step in the square there. Now that indicates that that's where the square originally stopped, and the rest of it used to be round. And that's a fairly common forming clockwork which is used to mount any kind of motion work with a clutch spring behind it so you can adjust it from the outside, such as so that you can move your hands around when the time goes forward or backwards for the spring and summertime, et cetera. And this indicates to us that the outer rings were originally driven straight off that arbor as makes sense. So all of the round of the houses lead-off work in Gwlymi's drawings was added post-manufacture. And the closer we looked at this object, the more signs of alteration and addition we see. I won't go into it all now because it does all get quite technical and we've detailed it all in the reports that we've prepared. But the basic picture we've seen is that the clock in Gwlymi's possession was different to the clock when it was made and the clock now is different to how it was when it was in Gwlymi's possession. Remains unclear as to why someone would go to the trouble of adding all of that extra work when their goal could be achieved in a much more economical way. There seems to be only two possible explanations for why this solution was not recognised. Either the original lead-off work had been lost and whoever came to replace it had limited knowledge and understanding and didn't really realise that there was a simpler solution. Or the clock was modified after manufacture to indicate a more simple thing than it had previously done and because the original function was much more complicated they couldn't see the simple solution for what they wanted to achieve. Whichever explanation is the case that the second wheel and the 366 toothed contract wheel on the outer ring are the only really reliable sources of evidence for the ring's original function at manufacture because of how much else has been changed. There's also this star wheel jumper mechanism in the equatorial ring which gives some indication of the potential secondary function associated with the rings but there are clear signs that this too has been modified. In its current configuration it isn't geared in any way that seems possible to show any kind of astronomical phenomenon. So all of that in mind our best conjecture to date that the original functions of the rings is this. The three rings rotated once every 24 hours were connected to each other by some form of strap or carriage and that strap or carriage carried indication for the sun's declination. I'm aware that this is probably a mixed audience so I'm going to apologise probably there's two sets of people here some who this is incredibly obvious to and some who it's incredibly abstract to so I'll try and get in the middle. The declination of the sun is the angle between the equator and a line drawn from the centre of the air so here's the equator we draw a line from the centre of the air to the sun and this is the angle of the declination. This varies seasonally due to the tilt in the earth's axis that is caused by its orbit of the sun not being perpendicular to the position of the poles so when we're here the sun's declination is a negative angle and when we're here it's a positive angle. A declination indication on the globe would simply track that changing angle throughout the year and movement to some sort of declination indication could have been communicated from the star wheel and jump mechanism in the central ring from a crank or cam mounted on this square shaft that protrudes here that's connected to that wheel back there. The star wheel would require a single pin instead of the pinion that it's currently fixed to which would engage with a 73-tooth wheel driving the square peg resulting in it completing one full revolution in 365 days and that way the full range of declination angles throughout the year could be demonstrated. There's certainly space for the arrangement to fit as well as signs that this area of the mechanism has been modified but the actual configuration and nature of the original components is unclear. So all of this is a bit conjectural. So as I mentioned earlier the materiality of this talk is really the only source of information that we have for its history pre-bullamy and post-bullamy as well so our conservation approach was definitely on the conservative side as it fits an object of this singular rarity. The treatment goal was to stabilise the clock as a static object for display and make it safe for occasional probably annual winding for special occasions like this one. This was also considered a rare opportunity to study and document the clock so two extensive reports were prepared one covering the history, function and conservation work and another more detailed covering each individual component and describing its condition, relationship to other components and signs of alteration or originality. One of our immediate conservation concerns were these spots of heavy corrosion. Localised pits of corrosion like this can sometimes be an indicator of the presence of particularly aggressive agents of corrosion such as chlorides or sulfides and we wanted to rule those out to make sure that our cleaning procedure was sufficient so I took some samples of the corrosion and carried out our FTIR analysis by the corrosion of bands. Whilst the infrared spectrum of the corrosion is fairly complex many of the pits were identifiable and the corrosion products characterised as a complex mixture of copper and zinc hydroxides and hydroxycarbonates. Neither chloride nor sulfide corrosion was indicated by the testing that we carried out. Spectra taken of the non-hitted areas of the plates were similar to that taken from the corrosion spots indicating that the spots are likely just extremely advanced stages of the general corrosion and tarnishing present on the rest of the plates. This is likely caused by pieces of microscopic dirt or dust causing localised differential corrosion cells leading to rapid degradation and pitting on these spots. So in short, we didn't need to do any specialised washing procedures or apply any corrosion inhibitors. We could just use standard clock conservation procedures so really the bulk of the conservation work was cleaning. Every component was cleaned manually by hand using inert solvents with medium brushes and bespoke scrapers made of wood or shell where necessary to remove dirt and corrosion. Another corrosion concern was this heavy acetate corrosion on the bell and bell nut. This is caused by the degradation of the leather spaces that are often fitted on bell mounts to prevent rattle and ensure a clean tone. It's not a particularly unstable corrosion as long as the source of the acetic acid in this case the leather is removed. The leather really was completely disintegrated and needed replacing to get any function out of the bell. So I solved this problem by replacing it with Plastazote which is a conservation grade cobalm of foam which is acid free in a nut. Additionally it was noted that the shape of the bell hole was causing the bell to be insecurely seated so the rim was touching the bell stand preventing it from sounding in a way that was in any way enjoyable which we addressed by placing a brass spacer in the gap between the bell and bell stand. Another area where things were flapping about quite a lot and generally not doing what they were supposed to was the hands. You can see here we've got a number of nuts and bolts that are trying to keep the hands in position but they're not actually working. The minute hand should be fixed back here on a sort of pentagon so the washers on this thread at the end that were there were just never going to work. So the hand called it though here and this nut we thought that they appeared to be quite historic and probably date from around Bullamy's time so we kept those retained and removed separately the modern nuts and washers and added a single spacer made of cast brass to do the job. So that sort of bell hole there are also a lot of screws missing in the case. Generally all of the screws were securing the upper middle section of the case to the central cylinder so they're like these ones here which they have this long rectangular head so you can get some flies around them to undo and they then have a short section of threads that screws into the cylinder and they terminate a long tapered pin that locates into the holes in the outer case sections and the ones that you can see in this picture are for the lower middle section and you can see these empty holes around the upper middle section one to the missing and you can see also at the bottom there's some different types of screws which hold the bottom section on and a couple of those were missing as well so these are all the various screws that I had to make to replace the missing ones to ensure that the object was stable because remember that this whole thing is suspended in midair the whole time so they're all made and finished by hand in order to match the aesthetic of the extant ones and the ones that were big enough to be identified in those replacements the threads were all cut using adjustable dies to match the existing threads in the globe ensuring that all the treatment was completely removable none of the historic material was damaged or altered so what I'd like to end on is the last bit of work that we did which was to record the operation of the globe in and out of the case and put a short video together it's about a minute and a half that can be used to aid future interpretation because as we've said it's all functional and even if it was you can't really see what it's doing inside the case so we made this video so that you can see what it's actually doing in there but first I just want to acknowledge a few people who've significantly contributed to this project and of course to begin with that is Malcolm who is also here this evening at the back and he was the lead conservator on this project with my tutor at Westin Society fellow is Jonathan Betts and Michael Wright but they both contributed extensively to the interpretation and unraveling of the outer ring mystery and offered a lot of helpful advice and comment on the preparation of the reports equally Westin College where I'm currently a student and whose facilities were used for all the work and Jessica Millay in the marketing department there who did the majority of the filming for the video you're about to see also you may have noticed that I've not really mentioned anything about the conservation or cleaning of the outer silver case and that's because that was all done by Richard Rodgers conservation info this year that was a separate conservation project so they also received a mention so now I will show you the video so it's suspended here in a sort of temporary test stand that we made so that we could check that it was all functioning in situ and that's the clock inside the case there so this is the winding where it's lifted up the central rod and you'll see now the chain rewinding around the barrels and this is the escapement working so this is the verge escapement and you can hear that in the case when you go upstairs if you're listening carefully that you're real well next to it so it strikes the halves a single blow every half hour it comes around at the hours and it strikes the hours as well quality French bell very nice long sound I would thank John, Heather and Danielle and all the team here for making it possible for me to show you the new Lewis award this evening at extraordinary short notice and as I'm an addition to the two excellent talks we've just heard, I will be much free for them in my work at Soledies it's more uncommon to answer inquiries about new discovered Lewis Chester usually my answer is a swift short but a light note and you can see here a representative group of the kind of Lewis Chester that we see but last August it was a bit different and I thought to a few of interest me to explain briefly how I approached the task of confirming my initial very positive impression but here unbelievably it was the real thing I was quoting the presser saying it was all dropped and I'm not sure I said that exactly but it was pretty impressive to see this once Jonah had brought the water to Bond Street and I was able to have the water in my hand in one sense on the most basic level it just felt right the wear, the carving, the material but it was essential me to be 100% sure about the material in particular this is an image of the inside as you can see obviously the majority of the Lewis Chester is made of water silvery with only three waters and two ponds which are made of sperm weld and so I asked Dr Sonia O'Connor fellow of the society and a respected archeological conservator but handled other pieces from the horse to inspect that water and confirm that he is indeed war asylum this was positive so with the owner we took the decision to do a radiocarbon dating test which as you know is an invasive test and is not something that one does lightly the result was not exactly straightforward since the first result gave a date range of 1328-1434 quite a bit later than the accepted dating for the horse which is to around 1200 however when allowance for the maximum marine reservoir effect is taken into account this extended the date range from 1283-1479 which is better but it still raises questions perhaps as many questions about the veracity of the test as the data that is chestnut reviewing the literature on the horse I was struck by how few definite facts we know about the chestnut the lack of hard facts about the numerous water did not now seem so unusual both the horse and this water are first documented in Edinburgh the horse in 1831 and the water in 1964 apart from notoriously unreliable and contradictory anecdotal accountants nothing really is known for sure about precise history of the water or out of the earth before that at a date we don't know exactly where the water was or went or by good that some pieces have been separated from the original court at some point before appearing in Edinburgh is certainly a possibility so if we return to our water if one supposes that the horse comprised four sets then there would be four waters and one night missing as well as many in fact 45 points what becomes very apparent when one looks at the chestnut themselves especially those in the British Museum which obviously has the majority it is that there is a huge variety in size and style of the chestnut this is an image from Dalton's catalogue in the British Museum group and this is thought that they have a variety it's not a new observation I just point out in particular the difference in the heights is quite extraordinary from ones which are around 7cm to those which are over 10cm and I think here you can see quite clearly the quality of the colouring of a king like this is very different to a more successful if you like hand of the king on the right but above all I want you to take on board the differences between them and it's the analysis of these differences that have resulted in the board being divided into these four sets depending on their size depending on some extent their quality the missing waters are lacking from the largest set and from the smallest set our order fits into the largest set so far so good but what about the C14 test frustratingly it is a test without the test because none of the other pieces from the board have been tested perhaps the test is not sophisticated enough perhaps we need to consider the possibility that the chestnut represents an archaeosising style of late 30th century of Norway we may have to wait for an answer until one of the other pieces from the board is tested which I suspect is not going to be in time soon so I return to look closely at the new Lewis board I was encouraged by one of the features that all my research included is unique in chest pieces to the Lewis board this is the fine network of channels which run across the whole surface of every piece in the board and as you see it here this is one of the orders from the National Museum of Scotland and you can you can notice that our order clearly appears dark and this is because the channels are filled with dirt and I don't know how the slide is but it's quite clear there but they are nevertheless to my eye pretty much identical the chances of these marks appearing on the chestnuts that looks, as you see here exactly like the Lewis chestnut and not being part of the order is, I believe, highly the most word about the colour of the new year's order and you will be able to see the varied dark brown that's going to sit orange here in this slide but this very dark brown colour better in regards to that clearly this is quite different from the modern appearance of the existing hall and I'll leave him on the screen from Edinburgh but we must remember that this is a modern appearance in 1832 Frederick Maddon noted a red or beaked colour in some of the pieces of that remains Tests at the National Museum of Scotland have detected mercury and sulphur in some of the Scottish pieces probably from traces of cinema for which they have concluded that some of them may have been coloured with red for me In 1909 when Dalton published his catalogue which I've mentioned of the British Museum I've used this image shows that several pieces were then quite a different colour from today and I've put most of you can see the British Museum Number 16 and 120 from the Daught in 1909 in an image that I just showed you and the respective B.M.1.6 and B.M.1.20 on the right which shows that then the colour was quite a bit different from today these images perhaps exaggerate the differences but my interpretation is that our warden had he appeared 110 years ago would have looked a bit less different from the hoard that he does today Also British Museum's scientific report conducted around 1997 noted areas of green and some of their pieces the possibility that some of the hoard was originally green could be supported green area on the back of our warden and we'll see that when you go upstairs it's actually at the back just behind the shield which is here and we're continuing to examine the substance Whilst I was researching the numerous water one expert observed to me that our piece is unusual because a chestnut in the hoard generally in good condition and the extent of damage on the water and the loss of the left eye and the right hand set it apart This image of the night when it ended demonstrates that there are certainly comparable areas of damage on the chestnut and the previous slide here as well we see quite extensive damage in some of those the sword is also quite damaged here Satisfied material, the C14 and the state of preservation of the water are close enough to the Lewis Hall of Sport to share history I turn to a closer stylistic analysis of the water group Now this is published in some detail in our catalogue for the auction which is happening on the 2nd of July and I've got some off-prints of this upstairs for you to see Suffice it to mention here that what is striking about the chestnut is that they are all very different and I illustrate a group again from the daughter of the knights and I think it's fascinating to see how different every shield the design here actually this one is very similar to the design on our water circular knot in between the two verticals but here with a decoration in between running up and down but Neil Stratford who I see here tonight in his booklet a booklet on the British Museum chest pieces with a diagrammatically all the shields of the knights and the waters and there's not one that is a second part to the one with a big decoration so what really struck me is that they're all different they all share similarities but they're all different and I think that our new water shares these affinities and these different which inherent certainly within the water group Now I'm very conscious that we have a refreshment waiting and I'm sure you're all keen to go and have something to drink and I've spoken enough and I hope that you will have some questions which I can answer and perhaps on the 44 o'clock upstairs we can take some questions on that up in the background so I think that's what to say and I hope that you will enjoy seeing the water upstairs and the very proper questions