Donald Hiscock | Articles | The Independent
Sometimes you get faintly photocopied pieces
of paper passed round an office that list spoof courses. I thought I had found
the rural equivalent when I picked up a leaflet at the Weald and Downland
Open Air Museum in West Sussex. I read about “Heavy Horses: Shaft and
Pole Work”, “Continuous Hurdle Fencing” and then my eyes
strayed to an “Introduction to Charcoal Burning” that included
the use of “the Webster Retort”.
They are far from being a joke, they are some
of the courses this innovative museum runs throughout the year. If you’re
really serious you can enrol for an MSc in Timber Building Conservation in
partnership with Bournemouth University. But we had come for a leisurely mooch
through the preserved buildings re-sited here at Singleton, to the north of
Chichester. The only course we took on a chilly autumn day was the circuit
around the museum site to clamber in and out of its forty or so historic buildings
preserved on a fifty acre downland setting.
I didn’t realise that lath and plaster,
tiles, bricks and different types of thatch were so interesting, but starting
the visit in an eighteenth century barn you are given an easy-to-digest survey
of the type of building materials to come. If the children start tugging at
your coat to move on you can have a wry laugh a few buildings further on where
they get to play with bricks. Trying to form a Flemish Bond kept them absorbed
for long enough for the parents to sneak a chocolate bar and a cup of coffee
from the Thermos flask.
After learning that your son wants to be a bricklayer
when he grows up it’s off to the Watermill transported here from Lurgershall
to watch grain being ground into flour. For lovers of obscure milling phraseology
you can learn about wallowers, stone nuts and shoes vibrated by a damsel.
I was reminded of Chaucer but my wife reminded me that we had promised the
children they could buy a bag of grain each to throw at the ducks on the millpond.
I could have lingered longer over this ancient technology.
What is interesting about this open air museum
is that you just come across the buildings as you lope about the site. You’re
never quite sure what you are going to get when you enter a house, cottage
or Victorian school room. What you do not get is a heavy dose of history set
out on display boards, rather you absorb the essence of place and time; you
seem to wander in and out of periods in history. Some buildings have log fires
going and unobtrusive volunteers who will answer questions. Other places have
buttons to press that release recordings of what it was like to be a skilled
practitioner of some once important craft and an explanation of the tools
such tradesmen used.
On the edge of a cluster of buildings that form
a sort of village square there is a pair of adjoining Victorian cottages.
You enter into one of them and the entire place is left bare to show you the
stages of its construction. When you walk through into next door you are in
touch with simple life. Four furnished rooms show you what it must have been
like to bring up five children in cramped conditions. Today, ironically, these
cottages would be prized and modernised as second homes by those escaping
the cramped conditions of late twentieth century city dwelling.
When you think you are tired of the minutiae
of domestic architecture Bayleaf Farmstead with its fifteenth century Wealden
house and adjoining barn and gardens is the place to visit. Here wallow large
gold coloured pigs, friendly chickens and passing shire horses pulling hay
carts. Inside the house in the family bedroom the children discovered the
en-suite garderobe and tried it for size. In late medieval times what slipped
down through the wooden hole was used as garden manure.
The toilet theme is continued in one of the
barns in what was probably the highlight of the visit for my younger son.
An exhibition on lead work and plumbing featured a Thomas Crapper flushing
toilet. Not for him the fascination of a charcoal burner’s kiln or the
memory of seeing a treadwheel for raising water. What got him giggling, and
still does, is the mention of that famous Victorian plumber.
The museum is still growing. The latest addition
is the late sixteenth century Poplar Cottage, which you can see being restored
in a workshop on the site. A recent £1 million grant from the Heritage
Lottery Fund has taken the museum a stage closer to the realisation of its
ambitious project to build a conservation centre and shop. The wooden structure
will be the largest of its kind to be built in Britain. Further fundraising
is needed to meet the total cost of the project.
It was dusk when we left the museum, having walked a couple of miles. We had spent almost four hours treading merrily through four centuries of social and architectural history. And by the way, did you know that the gearing ratio between the watershaft and the mainshaft in the Mill is roughly 1:3? Not many people know that.