Free spirited Victorian adventurer Margaret Fountaine gave an extraordinary legacy to the Castle Museum in Norwich. On her death in 1940, cabinets of more than 22,000 butterflies were donated to the Museum but the astounding collection came with a condition. The Museum must also accept a sealed black metal box which could not be opened until 15th April 1978. When the box was at last unlocked, inside were twelve thick diaries of over a million words, photographs, pressed flowers, postcards and letters full of colourful detail about Margaret’s travels across the globe. She took her butterfly net to sixty countries during fifty years of questing for rare species, often travelling by bicycle, the trusty transport of early female liberation. Begun on her 16th birthday, her diary was kept faithfully until her death, reputedly of a heart attack on a mountain path near Port of Spain in Trinidad, butterfly net in hand.
Her candid memoir records the unconventional life and loves of an independent-minded woman, a pioneer of citizen science. From Turkey to Tibet, Syria to South Africa, she roamed the world often with a male companion, Khalil Neimy, who was 15 years younger than Margaret, and married but not to her. Romantic and courageous, she lived on her own terms, acknowledged by Rosie’s Plaques, a guerrilla art project celebrating the radical women of Norfolk. A permanent double case in the Castle Museum’s Natural History gallery displays her lifelong work.
