Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 598
The Weald and Downland Museum
Hello Everyone
Nestled in a beautiful valley in West Sussex is a most gorgeous museum.
lt is not the kind of museum that you are used to with exhibits shown inside a big building – the buildings are the exhibits.
For those of you that don’t know, the weald is a forested plateau in the south east of England and the downs are chalk hills that encircle it. The area is quite rural with scattered villages and farmland cut out of the woods as was the Anglo Saxon tradition.
The Weald and Downland Museum is a collection of buildings that were moved from others places in the south east of England.
They were old buildings crumbling away, sometimes even rescued from demolition, when someone decided to widen a road or build a new one through the area. One was moved because a water reservoir was being built.
All of the buildings brought to the museum were under threat and could not be preserved where they were originally.
The buildings were dismantled after each stone, brick, tile, beam and gable was carefully numbered and logged.
Then they were put together again in the same order like the most enormous 3D jigsaw puzzle so they could stand as they had done for a very long time; but in a different place.
The thatch was redone.
But when they were reconstructed they did not have all the modern kitchens, bathrooms, electrical wiring and plumbing that had been put in them over the years to make them more comfortable to live in for modern people.
They were stripped back to how they would have been when people lived in them originally. There is bare stone and wood. There is no modern wallpaper.
You will see no television aerials or satellite dishes or letter boxes that old cottages have when people are living in them now.
Some of the oldest cottages don’t have a chimney. They only have one room to live in.
The older cottages with an upper floor have tiny twisting staircases.
The museum was begun in 1967, and built as a labour of love by a group of people who wanted to rescue old buildings before they were lost forever.
The buildings range from between the 1200s and the 1800s.
The earliest construction dates from 950AD.
Buildings can be dated exactly by testing the wood that was used to construct them. Some of the materials used would have been recycled from an earlier time.
The museum was first opened to the public in 1970.
There are over 40 buildings on 50 acres.
The buildings are vernacular – that means of the area.
The furniture put inside some of the buildings give you an idea of how basic inside décor was when the buildings were first inhabited.
They are not modern sets built for a film. The buildings are all original with their own souls and atmospheres.
Go to the village of Singleton.
Come out of the car park and veer to your left and you can see very old basic dwelling places from hundreds of years ago.
There is also a charcoal burner’s camp which was one of the first exhibits. A charcoal burner lived in the woods and made charcoal. This was wood partially burned with a limited access to air.
Charcoal could be used to melt metal in blast furnaces because it burned at a high temperature and also it was used to make gunpowder.
Making charcoal was a special skill. The burner lived in a hut on site because he had to keep an eye on the process of making charcoal over many hours.
Then you can visit a house that a yeoman, or rich farmer, would have lived in in the 1600s in West Sussex. lt was built in 1609. lt is called Pendean House. The food store is at one end of the house to keep the food cool and fresh and the living room with a large fireplace is at the other end to keep the family warm.
There is a half-timbered house from Kent with a garden around it called Bayleaf Farmstead with the kind of plants people would have grown. lt has a toilet which is a small room sticking out of the wall open to the outside. This is called a garderobe. lt is featured in the Picture Gallery.
There is no glass in the windows in the very oldest of buildings, only wooden shutters to bring down to keep the worst of the weather out.
The Market Square looks like a tiny village with a collection of houses.
The Market Hall was built in the 1600s in Hampshire. There is an open space downstairs and a room upstairs that was used as a town council chamber. lt is shown in the picture at the top of the post.
The brick drying shed was built in 1733.
You can visit a Victorian schoolroom from a coastal village in West Sussex.
There are Victorian cottages, a smithy and workshops.
There is a range of farm animals to see and a mill pond with waterfowl.
There are enormous barns.
There is a mill that produces flour you can buy. The erection of the mill and restoration of the machinery took seven years.
There are other rural industries to observe and activities for people to get involved in.
There are seasonal shows and historic garden weekends.
The museum has been given many awards, and has been used in many television programmes and films.
There are other museums where buildings have been reconstructed from different eras that you can visit in other parts of the country too.
These are good places to go for a day out during your summer holidays.
Bye bye everyone – don’t forget to subscribe to my blog!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bill: Duck! Duck! Duck!
Bob: Stop using such fowl language!
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
Follow the path and take a journey through time
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
This week, my Auntie Alice fulfilled a dream that she has had for a long time.
She bought a hammock.
Then she strung the hammock up in her garden between two trees.
But when she stepped back and looked at it, she realized that the hammock was big enough for one adult or two small children and knew at once that there would be arguments in her garden during the forthcoming summer holidays.
So she bought another one, and knew that four children would all be accommodated.
For their part, Emily, Henry, Bill and Bob all went to the library to borrow some books to read in the hammocks.
Auntie Alice went with them.
They knew that if they were together when they read them, they could swap over and get even more books to read than they could borrow on their own ticket.
So they left the library with quite a pile.
I expect you would like to know what they chose…
How to Record Sound by Mike Rofone
Railway Line Maps by Chris Cross
Undersea Creatures by Coral Reef
African Wildlife by Ellie Phant
Vegetable Growing by Bea N. Pole
Companion Planting by Mari Gold
Fruit Growing by Logan Berry
Star Watching by Claire Sky
How to Cure Sea Sickness by P. Green
Pet Care by Pat Doggy
Famous Rivers by Flo A. Long
DlY Projects by Andy Mann
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Quick Quiz
Do you know what these words and phrases mean?
- a fixer-upper
- a deposit
- more bang for your buck
- move-in-ready
- a mortgage
- a footprint
- stuck in a chain
- a vaulted ceiling
- an eavesdropper
- a honey-pot area
- An HMO
- A maisonette
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO MAKE A GREETlNGS CARD
A door is quite an easy picture to draw.
If you want to get the panels on your door, this will be a good project to teach you how to use a ruler for measuring.
Take a piece of thin card and turn it sideways.
Find out where the centre of the card is.
You will draw on only one side of the front of the card.
Put the door in the centre of the front half – which will be on the right side.
You can customize your door to fit the person you are sending it to.
You can put their name and house number on the card.
You could make the card into a birthday card or new house card or Christmas card.
You can use just one colour to colour in your door or use coloured card and draw the door on in pencil and then go over your lines with black felt tip.
Or you can make your card really colourful.
Then you can write your message inside – be careful and concentrate when you do this, because you have just spent a lot of time on your artwork.
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- a fixer-upper – a house that needs a lot of attention which means it is cheaper than if it was in good condition
- a deposit – an amount of money you pay to show that you are serious about buying something – you pay the rest of the money (the balance) later
- more bang for your buck – good value for money – maybe a big house found in an area where houses are cheaper
- move-in-ready – a house that you will not need to redecorate
- a mortgage – a large amount of money used to buy a property paid back to the lender (usually a bank or building society) over a number of years (the ‘t’ is silent when you pronounce this word)
- a footprint – the exact land covered by the bottom of a house
- stuck in a chain – when a number of people are all buying from and selling to each other and can’t move house for maybe many months – it may be that if one person solves a problem a lot of people can all move at once – the longest chains can be as many as 10 – 20 households
- a vaulted ceiling – a high sloping ceiling, not a flat one
- an eavesdropper – a person listening in to someone else’s conversation
- a honey-pot area – a picturesque area where the houses are more expensive because of it
- An HMO – a house of multiple occupancy (many people live in one house that are not related to each other like a family)
- A maisonette – like a flat with one or two floors, but it has its front door open to the outside not into a hallway
Honey-pot area
You can plan your trip here…
https://www.wealddown.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Weald-and-Downland-Living-Museum-Map-2021.pdf
