The Norris Museum
Telling the story of the historic county of Huntingdonshire from earliest times to the present day.
The Norris Museum, The Broadway, St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, PE27 5BX
info@norrismuseum.org.uk
http://norrismuseum.org.uk/
FREE ADMISSION
Opening Times:
MAY - SEPTEMBER: Monday - Saturday 10:00 - 17:00, Sunday 14:00 - 17:00
OCTOBER - APRIL: Monday - Friday 10:00 - 16:00, Saturday 10:00 - 13:00
Closed Good Friday, Christmas Day, Boxing Day & New Years Day.
THE NORRIS MUSEUM IS THE MUSEUM OF HUNTINGDONSHIRE. IT TELLS THE STORY OF THIS HISTORIC COUNTY FROM EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY.
THE OLDEST OBJECTS IN THE MUSEUM are the remains of animals that lived here 160 million years ago, in the age of the dinosaurs. Huntingdonshire was under the sea in those days and you can see the fossil bones of the great marine reptiles - Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs - that lived here.
MORE RECENT INHABITANTS OF THE AREA were the Woolly Mammoths that were here in the Ice Ages - you can see bones, teeth and a tusk which have been found locally.
PEOPLE HAVE LIVED IN HUNTINGDONSHIRE for a quarter of a million years. On display at the Norris are the flint tools of the first Stone Age settlers, and weapons and pottery from the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. There are finds from local Roman cemeteries and a reconstruction of the Roman town of Godmanchester.
WE HAVE ARMS AND ARMOUR from the Civil War, when Huntingdon was the birthplace of the Roundhead commander Oliver Cromwell and King Charles passed through the county as a hunted fugitive.
FROM A LATER WAR come intricate objects of bone and straw made by French inmates of the prison camp at Norman Cross during the Napoleonic Wars. And there are displays of the local craft of lace-making and the local sport of ice-skating on the flooded Fens.
OUR VIDEO SCREEN shows you films of the Fen skaters in action, and of traction engines that were built at St Ives by the family firm of Fowells.
THE NORRIS MUSEUM WAS FOUNDED BY HERBERT NORRIS, who left his lifetime's collection of Huntingdonshire relics to the people of St Ives when he died in 1931.
AS WELL AS THE MUSEUM COLLECTIONS, the Norris Museum has an art gallery showing paintings of the local landscape. There is also a research library (by appointment only).
This page was added on 21/09/2012.