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The Weald And Downland Open Air Museum
Aug. 24th, 2022 08:41 am Most of West Sussex seems to be privately owned. There's the land belonging to the Duke of Norfolk- who has his family seat in Arundel (because God forbid that he should actually live in Norfolk) and then there's the Cowdray estate and the Goodwood estate- and you drive down country roads that are lined with interminable stone walls that are there to keep us nasty wannabe poachers and scrumpers off the acres owned by our social betters. I disapprove of this state of affairs (as you can probably tell.)
We were in Singleton to visit The Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. It was raining- but not hard enough to make us give up and go home. The Museum is a museum of old buildings and country crafts- with a working water mill and a working forge. The buildings are mostly medieval and Tudor, none of them very grand and some very humble indeed. They've been rescued from dereliction and destruction on sites across the South East, brought here and reassembled. The grandest is a market hall from Titchfield, the most recent a 20th century tin church. One corner of the site is occupied by the barns in which they film the much-loved BBC series The Repair Shop.
The houses that are open for inspection have been minimally furnished- with tables, chairs, beds etc- and I found it a moving experience to wander round these middling to low status interiors. It was as if I was remembering having lived in such places myself.
Ailz was in her motorized wheelchair. We came to a steep and bumpy section of path. Ailz was for turning back but I said, breezily, "Nah, we can manage this," and the chair tipped back with Ailz in it- and I caught it. The chair plus person is very heavy- the batteries alone weigh God knows how much- but somehow I managed not only to stop it going to the ground but also to raise it back from the horizontal into an upright position. I don't know how I found the strength, but one does, doesn't one?
We were in Singleton to visit The Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. It was raining- but not hard enough to make us give up and go home. The Museum is a museum of old buildings and country crafts- with a working water mill and a working forge. The buildings are mostly medieval and Tudor, none of them very grand and some very humble indeed. They've been rescued from dereliction and destruction on sites across the South East, brought here and reassembled. The grandest is a market hall from Titchfield, the most recent a 20th century tin church. One corner of the site is occupied by the barns in which they film the much-loved BBC series The Repair Shop.
The houses that are open for inspection have been minimally furnished- with tables, chairs, beds etc- and I found it a moving experience to wander round these middling to low status interiors. It was as if I was remembering having lived in such places myself.
Ailz was in her motorized wheelchair. We came to a steep and bumpy section of path. Ailz was for turning back but I said, breezily, "Nah, we can manage this," and the chair tipped back with Ailz in it- and I caught it. The chair plus person is very heavy- the batteries alone weigh God knows how much- but somehow I managed not only to stop it going to the ground but also to raise it back from the horizontal into an upright position. I don't know how I found the strength, but one does, doesn't one?
