After visiting Durham (a couple of weeks ago!) we went on to Beamish Museum, a few miles to the north but still in County Durham http://www.beamish.org.uk/ and had a great day. It is an enormous open air museum with a farm, colliery, High Street with shops and trams, buses and trains. In fact it is difficult to describe how good it is and these photos only show a glimpse. We were there for hours and haven't finished seeing it at all. The little dogs got carried when we approached buildings and managed to get away with peeping into the indoor exhibits although normally dogs must stay outside. It was not crowded....the north-east of England is not crowded. Beamish is not cheap but is it worth every penny. Go early, stay late, take a picnic.
Mick took this pic of us celebrating a ride on a steam train. One of the earliest with no roof or seats. It was towed by a replica of "The Rocket" and coal was the fuel that got us up to 15 miles an hour. We went forward for a quarter of a mile and then came home backwards. Not sure whether the driver/engineer came to work in these really sooty clothes every day or whether he actually got that dirty in the first half hour.
There are lots of people dressed-up and wandering around in costumes. In the buildings there are schoolmasters, postmistresses, farmer's wives, grocers, dentists and music teachers and outside there are farmers, labourers, wood workers/charcoal makers and transport controllers. All of them are full of information about their role and their general history. They bake bread in the coal ovens in the cottages and make clippy rugs. One of the tram conductors told some young teenagers to go and line up properly...and they did!
Yes, Di was lurking in the bottom right-hand corner of the last shot. The blokes were in the "garage" drooling over the old cars etc and we had been into the sweet shop and bought some fabulous fudge. The dear dogs had spent the day trudging along coal-dust pathways and were black up to their skirt edges, and quite weary. In fact we all were and headed off on one of the last trams to the car park.We had a lovely picnic at lunchtime on the tables at the farm with the geese cackling loudly nearby waiting for our cast offs, and I tried to load those pics as well but the system went into meltdown
Cheers Gillian
1 comment:
You further-south folk seem to have so much more going on than we do here or amybe I just don't get our enough.
I love the smell of steam trains and would really enjoy a short holiday on the one that goes along the west coast of Scotland stopping off for nights along the way. One day..
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