Here at the Museum we explore the lives of the ordinary men and women whose working, rural lives were tied to the rhythms of the seasons.   We term what we do as ‘interpretation’ because we can never fully recreate or re-enact the past but we strive to base our demonstrations and information on all available sources.

All our houses are vernacular - the homes of peasants, labourers, farmers and tradesmen,  and to tell the story of the people who built and lived in them we have furnished several of them as authentically as possible, using replica furniture and artefacts.  Different methods are used  to describe the lives of these people:  sometimes we use display panels; occasionally audio-visual commentary and most buildings contain folders with explanatory information.  But most important of all we have stewards in the houses who will talk with you about the history of the house and the lives of its former occupants.  They would have been guided closely by the seasonal and ritual year and we do the same:  demonstrating their traditional skills, practices and domestic lives as closely as possible, bound by the seasons as they were.

Our working Tudor kitchen is just the place to discover the tastes of the period.