I'm Emily and I'm a English and historystudent and a visitor service assistant here at the Lapworth Museum of Geology.
So, the item that I have picked as my object of the month is this capped quartz,which is from the Virtuous Lady Mine near Tavistock in Devon. It's believed that this was sourcedaround the 19th century and it's actually a very, very rare quartz.
However, the reason that I picked this is not because of its rarity. This is located at the top of the museum in the gorgeous rainbow cabinet of all different minerals. It's one of my favorite places in the museum and I love to just go and sit there and look at them.
When I saw it for the first time, I thought that it looked exactly like a mushroom. I imagined all little woodland creatures and fairies and sprites living among it, protecting themselves from the rain and having their fun little imaginative life underneath this item. However, that's not the only thing that people have said that it reminds them of. Sometimes I've had people say that it looks like a little hat or that the texture of it looks like that of a watch face. And when I see the two pieces together, I think that it looks like a dragon egg, especially when you move it up and down. It looks like this pyramid bit is the joyous egg inside.
So the reason I picked this as my item of the month is because of the way it sparked my imagination and the different things that it made me think of about the world around us.
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