105-3148 – Heritage park

On our second day in Calgary we took a longer bus ride to go to Heritage Park (described as “one of Canada’s Largest Living History Museums”). The place was swamped by teenagers benefitting the School Safety Patrol Appreciation Day Picnic (there were 4,000 kids there!), but thankfully we mostly avoided them. Most interesting to us were the original houses (from the 1860s to the 1950s) that had been dismantled and rebuilt on site along with furniture and the everyday stuff of the period …these really showed how people lived. There was an indigenous people’s part too but that could have been a lot larger and with more information. I sketched this (the Shonts Grain Elevator built in 1909) from the spot where we sat and ate our lunch.

Fri-6-Jun-2025

104-3137 – Royal horse artillery “E” battery 13 pounder field gun

On this day we made a visit to the Imperial War Museum North – which is housed in a “deconstructionist” building (designed by Daniel Libeskind and supposedly “representing a globe shattered by conflict”…though I had to read the blurb on the wall inside to know that). The museum works hard to to engage the interest of visitors – with an complicated layout, huge videos played at regular intervals on the walls and lots of background information about the exhibits. According to the plaque this gun “fired the British army’s first artillery round of the first world war on the western front near Mons, Belgium”.

Thu-29-May-2025