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“…it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man…”  wrote Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, in his essay Essay  “Of Gardens” (1597).  I agree with him.  When I visit a town for the first time, the first place I go to is the museum. The second place is the town’s botanical garden or public garden.

But you do not have to visit gardens in the real world to enjoy their peace and beauty. Human beings seem to have planted gardens for pleasure as well as food, as far back as written records go, and probably earlier, and archaeological excavations now pay attention to evidence for gardens as well as buildings. There are many “gardens” recorded in history as wall paintings or written descriptions, which you can enjoy as a virtual experience. These were not real gardens but gardens illustrating an ideal. Plants which flowered or fruited at different seasons could be shown together and there is a lot of symbolism involved in the plants chosen, which I am not qualified to go into. But they are as beautiful as any real garden. My personal favourites are the garden painted on the wall of the tomb of Nebamun, a middle–ranking official who lived in Thebes in Egypt (around 1350 BCE); the garden of King Alcinous, described in the Odyssey (probably composed 8^th century BCE but thought to have been set in the Late Bronze Age around the 12^th to 11^th centuries BCE); and the garden painted on the walls of the empress Livia’s (58BCE – 29CE) dining room at her villa at Prima Porta north of Rome.

The estates of wealthy Egyptians always had a walled garden where the owners could enjoy peace and quiet and cool shade. The painting of the garden of Nebamun shows a pond full of fish,  water birds, papyrus and lotus flowers, which is surrounded by trees and plants: dom palms, date palms, acacias, sycamores and mandrake plants. You can visit this garden online on the British Museum website, or in the Egyptian galleries at the museum itself. I love it because of the beautiful colours, and I am very fond of pools with water lilies. It is easy to imagine yourself sitting by the pond, shaded from the hot sun by the palm trees, trailing a hand in the cool water and smelling the scent of the lotus.

The garden of Alcinous, king of the Phaiacians on the island of Scheria was described by Homer in book VII of the Odyssey. It was four acres in extent, watered by two springs and warmed by a constant west wind. Much of it was an orchard, which, magically, produced fruit all year round, pomegranates, figs, grapes, olives, apples and pears, without ever suffering from blight or frost. Beyond the orchard there were flower gardens. Even in translation (alas, I have no Greek) the words of the description paint a beautiful picture of an ideal garden, warm, peaceful and perpetually fruitful. You can almost feel the warm wind, taste the wine from the grapes. The Project Gutenberg website has a selection of translations by different people.

Livia was the wife of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. The dining room of her villa at Prima Porta was decorated with beautiful wall paintings of a garden surrounded by a low wall, with a wide variety of flowers, shrubs and trees, with birds perching in them, and garden furniture, drawn in exquisite detail – quinces, pomegranites, myrtles, oleanders, roses, daisies and many more. I have seen the frescos in a museum in Rome and they are beyond stunning. Google images will get you there – there are hundreds of them.

Take Bacon’s advice. If you are staying in, for whatever reason, refresh your spirits with a virtual visit to the gardens of our ancestors.

Recently, my current employers, whose services to tourism have been massive, were invited to meet Princess Anne at a garden party in Edinburgh. Alas, the nearest I have ever come to royalty was accidentally walking on the queen’s red carpet at a public event. The Egyptian government had lent some of the treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb to the British Museum, and the queen was going to open the exhibition. I was at that time a student at the Institute of Archaeology, now part of University College London, and the BM was my second home, so to speak. The Institute is located in Gordon Square, a few minutes’ walk away from the museum. We were always being sent round to look at the displays in the public galleries, and occasionally got to work in the stores.

The morning of the royal visit, I was working as usual on some stone age tools in the depths of the massive warren of underground passages and storage rooms below the public galleries. Those were the days before the war on terror; nowadays they wouldn’t have let any students in for a week before a VIP visit. The member of staff responsible for me had promised to come and warn me when I had to get out. However, as it approached lunchtime, there was no sign of him, and I thought I had probably better get going. The way out from my particular part of the underground maze opened onto one of the public galleries. I took my usual route and emerged from a door in the panelling of a gallery full of printed books to find myself standing on a red carpet in the middle of a roped-off area, with about a hundred people staring at me. Scandalised attendants leapt out from all sides and hustled me and my battered briefcase out of the way. As I looked back over my shoulder, someone had got out a carpet sweeper and was running it over the area my plebeian feet had polluted!

In my professional capacity I have cleaned many a floor. No, I don’t mean vacuuming the carpet. I mean excavating the floor of a prehistoric family home. One in particular stands out. The year I graduated from university, I went to work in France on an archaeological site in the Dordogne region. This area is famous for its prehistoric painted caves, but there are also many sites in the region where people lived as well. The site I was working on dated from the end of the last Ice Age, when humans, and they were modern humans like us by this time, were still hunter-gatherers. They lived, not in the deep caves where the paintings were made, but in rock shelters and overhangs. They often made them cosier by building fireplaces, and walls across the entrances, and paving the floors. The local limestone splits into handy pieces, and the shelter I worked in at the end of the summer had a floor tiled with limestone pieces carefully chosen and fitted together. It was covered with the rubbish the original occupants had left behind.

I spent about three weeks drawing and excavating that blasted floor. The words “sur le dallage”, “dans le dallage” and “sous le dallage” are still burnt into my brain like a French language exercise. First I had to draw the surface of the floor and everything that had been left lying on it – bones, flint flakes etc (sur le dallage). Then I had to take three dimensional measurements of all of these objects, and excavate each one and place it with a label in a little plastic bag. We didn’t have GPS in those days, so we used tape measures and a curious little string triangle constructed on the edge of the trench. You measured the depth of the object by sighting across to the triangle using a wooden measuring stick. Then I had to excavate the floor and take up all the limestone fragments, again carefully measuring in and labelling everything that I found in the cracks among those paving stones (dans le dallage). And finally I had to do it again when all the stones had been lifted and I got to the area underneath (sous le dallage).

This is the nitty-gritty of archaeology, which programmes like Time Team can’t really convey. It takes WEEKS to excavate a thing like that properly and a lot of it is boring, repetitive work, which nonetheless has to be done with absolute accuracy.  But the thrill is that you are uncovering the lives of humans thousands of years in the past, people who felt the cold of winter and wanted a fire and a windbreak, people whose feet got wet and wanted a floor that wasn’t a sea of mud, people who sat round the fire and gnawed on a marrow bone, and carved decorations on their possessions, whether for magic or just for pleasure. People very like us.

One of the most interesting jobs I have done so far in my new home town has been helping to digitise the museum’s accessions register. That is, the list of all the objects to which the museum has legal title as opposed to objects on loan. This involved simply copying the entries in the paper register onto a database, which sounds boring. But it wasn’t. The act of data entry introduced me to a fascinating series of objects which I had never encountered before, because the museum where I worked for much of my life was located inland, miles from the sea, and my new home is a group of islands surrounded by sea. Also it was in England, and my new home is in the far north of Scotland.

My previous museum contained no net sinkers; the people of my new home have been fishing for 9000 years and oval stones with a groove round the edge are quite common finds. When it comes to World War II, my former museum boasts a modest collection of gas masks, and a few mementoes of the munitions factory created from a local stocking factory and an intelligence centre. Scapa Flow was a major naval base: we are talking about a whole separate museum site on Hoy full of guns, portholes, binnacles and other bits of warships.

You don’t find “luggies” or peat spades in south-east England because there wasn’t any peat to be cut.

In my former museum, I quite often used trade tokens or “jetons” for dating 15^th and 16^th century pits full of pottery. In Orkney museum, these are rare, but church tokens are quite common. Metal tokens of various shapes, made of lead or other base metals, were issued to people considered by the various reformed churches to be qualified to receive Holy Communion. Most were issued by the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, although they are known in other countries, and they were especially common in the 18th and 19th centuries, although they began in the 16th century. They were later replaced by communion cards. People were visited by the church elders during the weeks before Communion was celebrated (it was not a frequent service, only two or three times a year), and could be excluded for ignorance of the tenets of their faith, or for sinful behaviour. The Church of England didn’t do this so I had never met them before.

My previous museum was based on the site of the third largest town in Roman Britain, and was stuffed full of goodies from wealthy Roman town houses and villas. The Romans never set foot on Orkney. There are only a handful of tiny pieces of Samian pottery and Roman glassware which had somehow found their way this far north of the border to the brochs where the local Iron Age elite were living while their counterparts in southern England had accepted Roman rule and built themselves Roman villas. But there are boxes and boxes of Neolithic Grooved Ware. Before I came to Orkney I had seen a couple of bits of Grooved ware in the teaching collection at my university and that was it.

19^th century farm equipment – ploughs, horse harness, churns etc. – is pretty standard all over Britain, but it has different names in the local dialect, so I have had to learn a whole new terminology. For instance, how do you platt a pig? It took me a week to find out that a pig platting tub was a tub where you put your recently-killed pig to pour boiling water over it to get the bristles off. Read “Lark Rise to Candleford” by Flora Thompson for the gory details of pig-butchery.

Three years of data entry have taught me as much as all the reading I have done since I came here.