Hidden Treasure Tour reveals Rochdale’s historical collections

Date published: 23 October 2018

Families were invited to a secret location in Rochdale during the Rochdale Literature & Ideas Festival to discover the hidden treasures of the town.

Attendees got up close and personal on Monday (22 October) with historically significant artefacts and objects, as they learnt the secret stories behind them.

Before embarking on a treasure hunt to find ‘missing objects’ in the vast collections, children built their own soul houses with Lego – dream homes that Egyptians believed they would live in once deceased – and created their own amulets, which Egyptians carried for good luck and protection.

The session was led by museum curator and collections manager Karen Heatley, assisted by Helen McFeely, the museum co-ordinator. Karen said: “This is the first time we have held something for families at our secret location. We wanted to give the public the opportunity to look at the large collection we have.

“It’s great to have the children, they give you a completely different interpretation on the things that we show them; no one ever thinks the same thing and it’s nice to be involved this year and teach the children about the collections.

“We’re really lucky to have this facility in Rochdale and to be able to provide the correct care for the items.

“Our family activities are more often based at Touchstones and we usually only invite specific visitors to this centre, like university students who want to see the history of textiles or groups of school children who are studying Egyptology in lessons.

“Our collections centre is a fantastic resource and it’s brilliant to be able to make it accessible to the public for the festival.”

Rochdale has an extensive Egyptian collection with over 2,000 objects, and a total of 100,000 objects altogether in the museum ranging from antique clocks, marble statues from the 1800s, a plumbers’ cart from 1920-1950 and 10,000 year old fossils.

The children explored up and down the storage aisles, each filled with hundreds of years history, looking at organic and industrial items before viewing Egyptian items such as canopi jars, shabtis, human hair that has been preserved for over 4,000 years, mummified crocodiles and sandals from 1500 BC.

Between 1903 and 1931, twenty separate donations of material from Egypt were donated to Rochdale’s Touchstones. These donations were made by Rochdale industrialist and land owner, Charles Heape, who had funded pioneering Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie, excavations in Egypt.

Charles, who was very passionate about Egyptology, supported Petrie together with the Egyptian Exploration Committee and the British School of Archaeology during the Edwardian period.

The Hidden Treasure Tour was organised by a partnership between Touchstones, Rochdale Literature & Ideas Festival and Manchester Science Festival.