Dates for Your Diary: DOWH Lecture Series for 2024
Owing to Covid we decided to deliver our talks via Zoom. This has proved popular and attendances have generally been far higher than for talks held in physical venues. We recognise that face-to-face contact is an important aspect of our activities and, as restrictions have eased, branch activities are gradually resuming with real meetings, workshops, talks and visits.
All talks will be held on the second Wednesday in each month and will all start at 7 p.m. They will be given in English. Reminders and Zoom invites will be sent by email to all members nearer the time and fuller details of each presentation will be available on the website. Fuller details about the 2023/24 programme will appear later in the Year.
Please note your microphone will be muted when you enter. Please leave it muted until the end of the talk, when there will be an opportunity for questions. It is also helpful if you would turn your video off as this helps the quality of the presentation.
Unless otherwise stated, all Talks start at 7 p.m. All talks will be in English
Wednesday 9 October 2024
Matt Osmont, Practice Director at Donald Insall Associates
Conservation and creativity: breathing new life into old buildings
A leading practitioner from a leading conservation practice, Matt will talk about the challenges of conservation—giving historic buildings a sustainable future—looking in detail at Plas Gwyn, a wonderful sixteenth-century gentry house on the Llŷn and Porth Mawr, one of the gatehouses in the town walls of Caernarfon.
Wednesday 13 November 2024
Mary-Ann Constantine, Professor at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies
Recovering Downing Hall: Exploring the world of Thomas Pennant (1726-1798)
Downing Hall, the Flintshire home of naturalist, antiquarian and travel writer Thomas Pennant, is now a heap of rubble, but it was once a busy hub for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge. Pennant’s correspondence network stretched from America to Siberia, but he was also a keen advocate of ‘travels at home’: his collaboration with artists such as Moses Griffith and John Ingleby has left us with a fascinating visual legacy of the buildings and landscapes of north Wales at the end of the C18th. In this talk, Professor Mary-Ann Constantine will share some findings from the Curious Travellers project, which has been editing Pennant’s letters and his tours of Wales and Scotland, and exploring his specimen collections in the Natural History Museum, London.
Wednesday 11 December 2024
Scott Lloyd, research manager for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales
Mapping North Wales before the ordnance Survey
By popular acclaim, a return visit from Scott Lloyd. He spoke to us before about early nineteenth-century ordnance survey mapping and this time will focus on the varied pre-Ordnance Survey mapping that survives for North East Wales which can be helpful in researching the history of houses. The talk will also discuss some of the different issues surrounding their use and look at how they can be used in a digital age.