Cardiff’s Animal Wall

To say that the 3rd Marquess of Bute was an animal lover is something of an understatement.

Not only did he introduce mammals like kangaroos and wallabies to his Isle of Bute, in Scotland, he also populated with a myriad of carved, sculpted and painted animals the palatial rooms he redecorated in Cardiff Castle (one example below) and he had a wall outside the castle adorned with stone-carved animals.

Luckily for us, his eccentricity means we can today still enjoy the nine creatures that sat atop his original Animal Wall, as well as the six additional animals that were added some forty years later, though the wall itself has moved from its original location.

‘From the southeast, Cardiff Castle, Wales’, between c.1890-1900, LC-DIG-ppmsc-07387,
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington.

The Animal Wall was designed by architect William Burges in 1866 but he passed away before it could be built. It was another architect, Burges's former assistant William Frame, who saw the project through to its completion in 1892, at which time the wall ran along the edge of the aptly named Castle Street, immediately in front of Cardiff Castle. The nine original animals were sculpted by Thomas Nicholls – they are a pair of apes, a bear, a hyena, two separate lions holding shields, a lioness, a lynx, a seal and a wolf. They have glass eyes, which mean some of them have a tendency to stare down rather menacingly at passers-by, and they were originally painted in naturalistic colours, though that paint has since been removed.

The bear is my favourite.

The hyena

In 1922, when the authorities decided to widen the road in front of the Castle, the wall was moved to its present location, just fifty metres along the road to the west, where it functions as a road frontage and boundary wall for Bute Park.

The extra six animals, sculpted by Alexander Carrick, were added to the menagerie in 1931. These – an anteater, a beaver, a leopard, a pelican, a pair of raccoons and a vulture – are different in style to the originals, a little more chunky and less lifelike, in my opinion, and they also lack the glass eyes.

The leopard

The two lions and the lioness

The lynx

Most fortunate of all, the whole wall somehow escaped the Cardiff Council planners’ demolition plans in the 1970s. What a catastrophe that would have been! As the signboard by the wall proudly declares,

the Animal Wall is one of the most delightful and photographed historic features in Cardiff. … [It] has inspired several literary works, most famously a story by Dorothy Howard Rowlands, which was serialised in the South Wales Echo and Express from 1933 and was enormously popular with a whole generation of children. Characters included William the seal, Priscilla the pelican, Martha and Oscar the monkeys, Larry the lynx and Romulus and Remus the two lions.

The anteater and the apes

The raccoons

By the start of the 21st century, the animals were showing their age (and the anteater was missing his nose!) so, as part of a £5.6 million refurbishment of Bute Park, the wall and its animals were comprehensively repaired and restored, though I notice the wolf has already lost one of his ears. Let’s hope the animals manage to survive another hundred years so they can delight animal-lovers old and young for generations to come.

The beaver

The pelican

The seal and the vulture

The one-eared wolf

Siem Reap’s Giant Puppet Parade

The vulture

“Khnhom koeu tmat (I am a vulture),” shout the kids, as they proudly wheel and carry their giant red-headed vulture puppet around the inner city streets of Siem Reap, their little faces beaming with pride, their smiles wide and bright. 

The Giant Puppet Parade, held in Siem Reap every February for the past seven years, is the culmination of months of planning and three weeks of intensive workshops, with kids from local NGOs and staff and volunteers from around the world helping to build the giant puppets, designed by the parade’s artistic director and master puppeteer Jig Cochrane. And this year I was privileged to join in the workshops.

Firstly, let me stress, these are indeed giant puppets – this year’s vulture is perhaps 30 feet long when all its bits, from top of beak to tip of tail, are laid out and, if extended outwards, the wings would flare out approximately 20 feet. And they are made up of many pieces – the vulture has at least 15 main parts, as well as many feather panels that have been added to its body or were flapped about by excited children on parade night.

And the vulture is not the biggest of the puppets, which this year include the Asian cobra, a porcupine, two frogs, the slow loris, a bee and a stingray, as well as our red-headed vulture. These creatures are all endangered and one of the ideas behind the parade is to raise awareness of the rarity of the creatures, both with the general population and with the children. Where possible, the workshops include a talk to the children about the creature they are making and the creatures are also profiled on Facebook.

As well as educating people about the rarity of these beautiful creatures, the Giant Puppet Parade aims to foster creativity and artistic ability, in the artists and volunteers who come from overseas to volunteer with the project, in the young adult artists from the Phare Ponlue Selpak Art School in Battambang, who help to lead the workshops and, most especially, in the young Cambodian children who take part in the workshops.

This year, children from the projects run by 16 local NGOs took part in the puppet-making process. They were mostly from within Siem Reap city, though one group travelled an hour from their rural village to take part, and they ranged in age from perhaps 7 or 8 to their late teens. Some had worked on the puppets in previous years, others were first-timers so needed more help, and all were just wonderful to work with.

The kids taking part in the first weekend workshop came from the Landmine Museum Relief Centre, and many had been the victims of landmine explosions. Some had missing or artificial limbs, some limped badly, but all were happy, constantly smiling and laughing. It was humbling and inspiring to see how well they coped with their disabilities. As well as encouraging their creativity, the Giant Puppet Parade helps to shine some light in their otherwise dull lives, to let these kids enjoy some much-needed fun and excitement.

And the workshops themselves? Each session began with games – Jig is also a master showman and motivator, and very good at creating the right atmosphere, getting people warmed up and the kids laughing with games like “Zip. Zap. Boing.” Then the puppet making began in earnest, starting with Scotch tape to fasten two or three pieces of rattan strips together. These are the basic construction materials of the puppets and the barrel shapes we then built with these strips are the basic building blocks. The barrels can be small or large, thin or fat, and can be added to to make larger structures, like the heads of the vulture and the cobra. We used globe shapes in the same way – circular strips were taped together to form circles, with more and more circles added to strengthen the whole thing.

Next, the kids taped sheets of various colours of tissue paper over the rattan. Then, the whole was smothered in glue – we used industrial strength PVA diluted with water – and more paper added, to cover the Scotch tape, to intensify the colour and to further strengthen the structure – the glue hardens as it dries.

These structures were decorated in a variety of ways – the kids cut slices and slivers out of pieces of square, circular and rectangular metallic paper to make snowflake and doily designs, then glued these on to the shapes.

The porcupine, for example, was basic white, with plain black circles and squares and gold metallic strips stuck on. It’s a very effective way of decorating the whole and the creatures looked stunning when assembled and lit up from within.

Following the week of puppet-making workshops with the NGO kids was another week when staff and volunteers put the finishing touches to the puppets, fastening together their pieces, adding the moving parts, sound and light, and mounting some on platforms and wheels.

On the night of the parade, the kids and staff from their NGOs, guided by the project staff and volunteers, wheeled, lifted and pushed their brilliant creations through the streets of Siem Reap in a haze of wild excitement. This year’s puppets were bigger and better than last year’s, more people came to watch the glorious parade, and the project was a stunning success – a shining example of how a community arts project can provide a creative platform for disadvantaged children to foster and promote self-confidence through art.

I didn't actually get to see much of the parade myself as I was roped in at the last minute to act as number 2 puppeteer on the Hanuman puppet (one of two puppets with their roots in Khmer culutre) and we were the teaser, dancing around at the head of the parade, playing with the crowd, helping build the excitement and anticipation for what followed. So, I'm already planning on being in Siem Reap next February so I can see it all again for myself ... and maybe help out with the puppet making again, too. It was such a brilliant experience. Why don't you come too?

Hanuman and Sovann Macha

The slow loris

Chiclayo day one: pyramids and glorious grave goods

We hit the ground running in Chiclayo!

After a good sleep on the bus and a taxi to Hotel Embajador (highly recommended – lovely staff, smallish but clean, comfy room), we quickly got settled in and, feeling really refreshed after a nice hot cup of tea, made for us by the hotel owner’s wife, we booked ourselves on a full-day sightseeing tour.

The tour guide and driver collected us at 10am and our small group of intrepid travellers headed north to Túcume, the Valley of Pyramids. No, this isn’t about a trip to Egypt. Almost everyone has heard of the Incas but almost no one knows about the civilisations that existed in Peru prior to them, and northern Peru is full of incredible adobe pyramids built by the pre-Inca Sican, Moche and Chimú civilisations.

Sadly, these pyramids have been badly affected by water erosion, evidence of the ferocity of the rainy season from December to March. They have also partly been plundered and destroyed over the centuries by tomb robbers. There were once 26 pyramids at this huge site, covering approximately 540 acres; now, only 6 remain.

Model of what the site would originally have looked like

Archaeologists speculate that the Túcume site was originally occupied by the Sican people (from 800 to 1350 AD), who were then conquered by the Chimú (from 1350 to 1450 AD), who were subsequently overthrown by the Inca (from 1450 to 1532 AD). There was a museum at the site, but it was primitive, and the few replica sculptural reliefs we saw didn’t really provide a good idea of the apparently sophisticated societies that once existed here.

The landscape was desert-like, with vultures circling overhead and heat-crazed dogs chasing lizards amongst the scrub. We were shown carob trees, evidence that there is water deep underground as the roots of these trees can delve as deep as 70 metres in search of water, and we climbed a short way up the side of the La Raya mountain to get good views of the surrounding landscape.

Lunch was a welcome respite from the noon-day sun and delicious to boot! We dined at El Rincόn del Pato in Lambayeque, where we thoroughly enjoyed the local delicacy arroz con pato (rice with duck).

Then it was on to one of the best museums I have ever visited, the Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán (the Museum of the Royal Tombs of Sipan). It is shaped like one of the original pyramid structures and full of the amazing finds excavated from the tombs we were to visit later in the day. In particular, it houses the huge collection of gold, silver and copper grave goods recovered from the tomb of El señor de Sipán, the Lord of Sipán, who ruled over this area during the time of the Moche civilisation. The objects on display were dazzling in their magnificence, and the exhibits included reconstructions of the tombs so you could see how things would have looked at the time of burial.

Unfortunately, photography was not allowed within the museum but our next stop was to the actual tomb site, the Temple of Sipan, 33 kilometres south east of Chiclayo and about an hour’s drive from Lambayeque through mile after mile of sugarcane fields, and cameras were allowed in the local site museum, the Museo de Sitio Huaca Rajada. The finds were again impressive, from ritual ceramics and reconstructed tombs to the very scary-looking death masks recovered from the tombs of warriors and priests.

The temple itself is another large pyramid structure, much weathered but well displayed, with the excavated areas now covered to provide protection from the rain and some of the excavation holes reconstructed to give visitors an idea of what the burials looked like.

It had been a fascinating, if long and tiring day, and it was topped off by a very co-operative Burrowing Owl obligingly remaining still long enough for me to grab some photos and a huge red sun setting over the not-so-distant ocean on the drive back to Chiclayo.

Understandably, we were exhausted, so we got the hotel owner’s wife to make us some dinner and crashed early as we had another full-day tour booked for the following day.