FORTHCOMING EVENTS
9th October 2024 [afternoon] Limited Places
This is with Tameside Local History Forum
Visit to the Co-op archive, Holyoake House, Hanover St, Manchester (just across the road from Victoria Station) with Jane Donaldson, the Archivist, and a talk on the history of the Co-operative movement from the Rochdale Pioneers to the present day.
This trip has proved very popular and we now have a list of our allocated numbers but also another list of dissapointed members. At the moment we are looking at having a trip there again some time soon.
This is the link to the web site.
20th November 2024 2.00pm Zoom Talk
Charlotte Coull Magic and Science in the Stone(s) of Alderley Edge . Alderley Edge may be a Site of Special Scientific Interest, but it has also inspired a number of fantastical myths. Its geology has been exploited by mines since the Bronze Age, and studied since the nineteenth century, but the unusual rock formations have also given rise to a rich variety of interpretations that have been woven into local folklore. How can a place be half magic and half science? How can we reconcile these two different ways of understanding an area?
Covering people and organisations from Victorian archaeologist William Boyd Dawkins to modern day fantasy author Alan Garner and the Derbyshire Cave Society, and drawing on psychogeography and phenomenology, this talk explores Alderley Edge as a place where imaginative subjectivity meets scientific objectivity. There’s also a wizard, a stone with a golden aura, and the devil himself to add to the mix. So, can we unpick this chaos to explain why Alderley Edge has been the subject of this enduring fascination?
Charlotte Coull is an independent scholar and public historian with a PhD from the University of Manchester. Her thesis examined the agency of stone in the development of British archaeological practice in India and Egypt and her research interests include
materiality, environmental history, colonial knowledge creation and public engagement. Find her on Instagram @drcharlottecoull and YouTube @appliedhistorian.