Heritage comes in a number of forms, or species if you will, some endemic, or arising out of a place as unique, others native, or imported as ideas or material shapes. Some heritage is intangible and impossible to preserve, except by practice and repetition, such as dance, or by translation into a medium, such as film, that captures it for posterity. Other heritage is tangible and can fall into a couple of camps, the one moveable, like the travelling quarters of the Roman army, while others are fixed in the landscape, like the Roman aqueducts of France, or the great buildings of the Bermuda Dockyard. Moveable heritage is a major category of human legacy and it is represented by the innumerable forms of artifacts that are housed in museums, stately houses and in the homes of people around the world.Much of what is heritage today was not created to that end, but rather for practical purposes of living. Some such objects or buildings have stood the test of time and may even be considered “art”, although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, when contemplating the Mona Lisa or a cast and wrought iron water wheel in the grounds of a St. Lucian sugar plantation. An appreciation of all forms of heritage has perhaps accelerated in some modern societies in due proportion to the accelerated rate at which we can destroy the works, portable and “permanent”, of past generations. A goodly sum of the century and a half of accumulated historic architecture in the City of Hamilton has been obliterated in less than a third of that time, for at the beginning of the “Age of the Bulldozer”, heritage in Bermuda was not so much a dirty word as an almost completely alien one. Fortunately, attitudes have changed somewhat, although we often bolt the cultural and environmental doors after the herd has escaped.It is questionable whether the ancients or even more recent craftsmen and artists set out to create heritage, or whether they aimed to make a good work, within the limits of understanding of the day. There is of course the old adage that”‘truth is beauty”, or to say in another, intangible, way, that if something is beautiful, it must be true. There have been perhaps few beautiful buildings that turned out to be “untrue”, that is, to record that they fell down soon after completion. A good work of art, of whatever craft, is something that endures, or is encouraged to endure, as when paintings are preserved. Such works have always had value in the minds of many over the millennia and now those works are called “heritage”.When the National Museum asked Graham Foster to paint the walls of the Pillared Hall with scenes reflective of Bermuda’s history, we were not thinking of the creation of heritage, but rather of making an exhibit on the walls of the room, as the small floor space allowed of no normal exhibition usage. Yet the master artist that he is, as all who see his work in the “Hall of History” at Commissioner’s House must agree, our Bermudian lad has created heritage, a new piece of art that is at once a artistic heritage masterpiece, while its content is all about the heritage of this island from its natural environment that existed upon discovery by Juan Bermudez in 1505, through many of the material things and immaterial concepts that comprise our history of the last five centuries.It was with some of these thoughts in mind that at the suggestion of “The Bardgett Girls”, mother Marguerite and daughters Judy and Marilyn, that I ventured east into Paget Parish a few Saturdays ago to see the annual craft market held (by invitation only to the crafters) in the hall of the parish church, St. Paul’s. Upon entry into the main room, not quite occupying stage centre was Dale Butler, JP, MP (he of codfish cake competitions) with a large array of the books that he has published over a number of years. Having not thought of books as a craft previously, I reflected that they sometimes made decorative doorstops, but will have to take up that discussion with others more knowledgeable, but I do congratulate Mr. B. on the range of his subjects and productions, as I do with all those who made the arts and crafts that I saw in the hall that day.In the entry corridor, there was one fellow touting endemic (heritage) trees with a table of baby cedars, coupled with a clever reuse of broken marble bottles from Bermudian ‘mineral’ makers, next to spicy jam creators and hand painted pottery objects of many forms. Nearby, one artist had made her own paper and then designed small notebooks with it. Within the hall, there were myriad delightful and useful objects: jewellery and other finery, including feathered works obtainable for the female side of the equation, while ship models and artwork in cedar appealed to the male, of whom a few were in the audience. Glassware, paintings, children’s toys, a great array of jams festooned the tables and a homemade fish cake or Bermuda burger could be crafted for instance consumption at the kitchen window.Items crafted in clothes of many types and colours abounded, with beauty products and candles available for romantics. Hand-painted tiles, ship models and picture frames made of pottery sherds expanded the great range of objects available for sale and possession for years to come.In the fullness of time, many of these craft objects will become part of Bermuda’s heritage collections, though in the case of jams, the bottle, not the content, will thus survive. So all the ladies and the few gentlemen participants, while crafting artwork of all ilk for conversion to cash by sales, were in some instances unconsciously adding to the island’s stock of future heritage objects.In that, the women have perhaps always dominated the craft fields, except say for the massive production of cedar and other works by Boer prisoners of war in 1900-02. Drs. Henry Wilkinson and Michael Jarvis remind us, in their historical tomes, of the great trade in goods crafted by Bermudian women in palmetto in the eighteenth century, when the streets of London gaily exhibited plaited hats from the island: would that we had some surviving examples of that early, uniquely Bermudian, heritage. Such was the demand for those craft products that the palmetto had to be protected, as the quest for the fine leaves of the young plants was in danger of killing off that one of Bermuda’s two endemic tree species.Thus the creation of a women-made heritage was in danger of obliterating one of the only seventeen endemic plants that evolved over a million years or so on this ocean isolated archipelago.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director[AT]bmm.bm or 704-5480