Apr 17

Apr 17 ~

Outside one of the reconstructed historic homes - this one is from the 15th century - at the Weald & Downland Living Museum

There’s something strangely visceral and affecting about being inside the home of a farming family in the Middle Ages, faithfully rebuilt and restored so that it is as close to exactly as it was when the original occupants lived there all those centuries ago. The smoke darkened roof from years of fires, lit in the sunken central fire-pit. The rudimentary beds with their, rope strung bases, straw mattresses and pillows. The implements and household items of daily life, arranged as they would have been then.

The upstairs bedroom in one of the houses in the Weald & Downland Living Museum

It’s all well and good seeing artefacts in museum display cases, it’s quite another seeing them in their original settings and being able walk around them without a glass screen separating you from them. It’s also quite another thing being able to explore inside more than 50 relocated and meticulously reinstated historic buildings and experience what life was like for the people who lived and worked in them from as early as 950AD right up to Victorian times.

The interior of one of the 50+ restored buildings in the Weald and Downland Living Museum

You can do all this , and more (see below), at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, which is not one of the leading centres for the conservation of historic buildings, but also, unexpectedly, well to me anyway, home to the iconic venue of one of television’s best loved programmes (I’ll get to that shortly).

Let’s stick with the historic buildings for the moment., some of which have adjoining gardens, carefully planted as they would have been at the time

Some of the relocated buildings have gardens, planted as they would have been at the time

It’s not just homes that are dotted around the 40 acre site, there are agricultural buildings including stables, a smithy, a plumbers workshop and a brick drying shed. And public buildings like the Market Hall from Titchfield, and a toll house originally from Beeding. There’s a Medieval shop, an 18th Century school, a church from 1908, a diary from 1806 and a woodyard complete with a hand-operated timber crane from 1900 which has been restored to fully working order and is much used in the restoration work done on the museum’s buildings.

A shop - left - and a town hall - right - at the Weald & Downland Living Museum

A discreet sign outside each property tells you a little about its background and gives it’s period a historical context. But the real treasure when it comes to the details of where the building was found, how it was restored, who lived there and what life was like for them is provided by the astonishingly knowledgable guides who are in almost every one.

I particularly loved chatting to the guide in the pair of 1860 agricultural labourers cottages (two of the most recent of the buildings on the site), one of which has been left unfinished so you can literally see how it was constructed

The bare bones construction of a Victorian agricultural labourer’s cottage

The other has been furnished exactly as it would have been, when the family of ten occupied the two cramped upstairs bedrooms - the parents and baby in one, the seven children sleeping top to toe in the beds in the other.

Seven children slept together in this bedroom

The rest of family life took place in the two small downstairs rooms

The downstairs of the cottage where the family of ten spent their waking hours

and where the mother would prepare the family’s meals on a TINY aga style stove .

The museum is interactive in all manner of ways. Not only can you clamber up staircases and ladders, and sit on some of the furniture, including at wooden desks in an 18th century schoolhouse, there’s also a lively programme of demonstrations which include blacksmithing, dairying, spinning flax, and examples of period dishes prepared in the original on-site Tudor kitchen (where we learned that at times, the wheat in loaves of bread for the poorest in society was substituted for sand!)

A Weald & Downland Living Museum blacksmith explaining and demonstrating how blacksmithing was done centuries ago

The blacksmith’s forge is worth seeking out, not just for the insight it gives you into the craft as it was done centuries ago and the realisation that much of it is not all that different from today, but also for the building that’s its immediate neighbour.

Maybe you already knew this, but I certainly didn’t, so imagine my surprise - and delight - when came across the instantly recognisable exterior of the building where that aforementioned, much-loved television series is filmed. Signs ask you not to take pictures, so I didn’t. But that doesn’t stop me using this on-line one to tell you which programme it is

Who knew that the Repair Shop is filmed at the Weals & Downland Living Museum? Not me.

In case you couldn’t tell, there’s more than enough to see and do at the museum to fill a day, so it’s worth knowing that there’s an excellent cafe, delightfully situated overlooking an attractive lake, as well as shepherds hut selling drinks, sandwiches and cakes, that there are toilets dotted around the site and that they do their best to make it the site as accessible as possible, albeit with the proviso that these are authentically recreated historic buildings, so not inherently wheelchair friendly.