448 visitors came through the door of Gold Hill Museum during the three days of the May Day Bank Holiday weekend. Apart from the permanent local history displays, there were FIVE temporary exhibitions for them to see. Shaftesbury Camera Club’s exhibition of top-class prints (above) continues in the Garden Room until Friday 06 May. Also available to view until the end of the season are: a magnificent array of fans from the Museum Collection; an insight into the history of Shaftesbury and Tisbury workhouses; a short history of King Canute (who died at Shaftesbury in 1035); and documents, artefacts and photographs from our Heritage Lottery Funded Community Project in a newly-opened show entitled Shaftesbury Remembers the Great War. Admission to all parts of the Museum is free.

The focus for the next Reminiscence Afternoon at Shaftesbury Library on Tuesday 26 April at 2.30p.m. will be “Childhood”. Ann Symons and Claire Ryley are hoping that contributors will recall their own experiences, and stories told by older family members, about growing up in the early twentieth century. Ann and Claire are currently putting the finishing touches to an Exhibition entitled “Shaftesbury Remembers the Great War” in the Large Exhibition Room at Gold Hill Museum. This will illustrate the considerable progress of the Heritage Lottery Funded Community Project. Ann and Claire can be contacted on 01747 852157 or via education@goldhillmuseum.org.uk

Visitors to Gold Hill Museum from Monday 27 June are promised a free visual and cultural spectacle as Tibetan monks from Tashi Lhunpo Monastery create a Sand Mandala in the Anna McDowell Garden Room. Using millions of grains of coloured sand, the monks draw intricate designs representing a fabulous palace into which they invite the Buddha as part of a traditional meditation. After a dedication and blessing the Mandala will be ceremonially destroyed and dispersed at noon on Monday 04 July.

Tickets for an evening performance of masked dance and sacred chant in Shaftesbury Town Hall at 7.00p.m. on 04 July are available from Nature’s Treasures at 15A High Street and on line at www.eventbrite.com.

Following last year’s successful Photographic Exhibition held over a holiday weekend, Shaftesbury Camera Club are returning to the Anna McDowell Garden Room at Gold Hill Museum for a week long show. The Exhibition of top quality prints will run from Saturday 30 April until Friday 06 May, 10.30a.m to 4.30p.m. Entry is free to both the Exhibition and the Museum. The image of Swanage Pier was kindly provided by David Lampard of the Camera Club.

A new exhibition for 2016 created by Librarian and Archivist Ray Simpson tells the story of two local workhouses. In 1834 Parliament was keen to cut the welfare bill and the Poor Law Amendment Act abolished the practice of giving outdoor relief to the able-bodied poor. Recipients of welfare now had to enter the workhouse, where conditions were made deliberately unpleasant to discourage claimants. Ray’s fascinating exhibition couples extracts from letters and documents detailing the foundation of the new workhouses in Shaftesbury and Tisbury with episodes in the lives of unfortunate inmates: Martha Street and Eliza Tucker, jailed in 1869 for “fighting, quarrelling and making use of most obscene and profane language”; the Tisbury vagrant punished in 1907 for refusing to break stones for fear of losing his one good eye. This display is outside the Museum Library on the first floor and will run until October.