Dawn Chorus: Britain's best museum gift shops

Never mind the exhibits, what about the gift shop?

The Museum and Heritage awards shortlist was released this week, celebrating the best museums around the country in all sorts of categories, from ‘visitor welcome’ category to sustainability, innovation and more. All very good, but we couldn’t but help take a second look at the award celebrating the one bit of every museum that every visitor sees: the all-important gift shop. Here are the nominees; winners will be announced on May 15.

• Dundee Contemporary Arts — DCA Shop
• Portsmouth City Council’s The D-Day Story — D-Day 80 Shop Refit
• The National Gallery, London — Bicentenary Year Retail
• National Football Museum, Manchester — Shop of the Year
• The Real Mary King’s Close, Edinburgh — Gift shop

The curious incident of the Beech in winter

Beech trees, like most of Britain's deciduous trees, lose almost all their leaves in the winter. Yet the beech has a curious twist on this behaviour: train it in to a hedge and it hangs on to many of its leaves until the replacements come through in Spring. This and more you'll learn in our complete guide to beech trees.

A rail replacement service you won’t mind getting

The Great Central Railway — stretching across Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, and connecting Sheffield to London — originally opened in 1899, only to be closed less than 70 years later in the reforms of the 1960s. In the decades since then it’s become a popular heritage railway, with one problem: a 500-metre stretch between the two sections of track was demolished after the line was closed.

Efforts to rebuild the missing section have been ongoing for a while, and to help raise funds a ‘reunification’ weekend special will run on April 5 and 6, with vintage 1960s buses on hand to bridge the missing section of rail for the two days. Finally a bus replacement service that you won’t mind getting; tickets are on sale at tickets.gcrailway.co.uk.

'It's everything we need for hurleys'

Ash tree dieback has exacted an awful toll on the landscape of Britain. Over in Ireland it’s been just as devastating, but as well as ridding the land of many trees it’s also threatened one of the Emerald Isle’s most popular sports: hurling. The sticks used — called hurleys — have long been made from ash since, as hurley maker Richard McCarthy explains, it’s ‘strong, flexible and lightweight — everything we need for hurleys’.

Help is at hand for McCarthy and his fellow makers thanks to the Blenheim Estate, which is supplying around 1,000 ash tree ‘butts’ harvested from the Estate as part of the programme to manage dying trees while looking to preserve all those that are showing signs of natural resistance to ash dieback. ‘Whilst the majority of the timber will go for firewood, it’s great to see some value being realised,’ says James Hunter, Blenheim’s Rural Property Manager.

We might be nearing the point where the only sane reaction is to throw your hands up in the air and wonder out loud where it will all end

Back in the 1990s, when IBM’s supercomputer first beat Garry Kasparov at chess, writers breathed a sigh of relief and gave thanks that while a terrifyingly powerful mathematical algorithm might be able to master a game with strict rules and tactics, at least those machines would never surpass human creativity. Seems like that confidence might have been misplaced, as ChatGPT is now writing fiction... and is apparently worryingly good at it, as our colleagues over at TechRadar report.

He shoots, he misses

Country Life's James Fisher went to Cheltenham on Wednesday; so did Getty photographer Chris Jackson. Poor old Chris seemingly missed the chance to get a picture of James, and instead had to console himself with capturing this familiar-looking lady in the crowd...

That's it for this week — Dawn Chorus will be back on Monday