Visiting St Fagans National Museum of History

St Fagans is an open-air museum containing buildings (mostly homes) either relocated or reconstructed from around Wales and from different time periods in our history.   They also hold some of the artifacts that people from those times would have used when living in those spaces.  These are actually the types of museums that interest me the most as you get to have an idea of how everyone got to live, rather than just the rich few.  

Unfortunately, we didn't have time to look at all the buildings properly as there is so much to see and some were not open to the public this time around.  There were a couple that I really wanted to see, but that just means that we'll need to return sometime soon.  And, now that I know what there is there I can go back with more specific questions in mind and maybe even get some ideas about what to have in our home when we finally get around to getting it.

I did end up taking a lot of photos of buildings and interiors, more specifically of structural things like up close-ups of stone walls and the weaving inside the thatched rooves.  There are also quite a few of the gardens where they were using their greenspaces to grow vegetables and keep livestock rather than just for growing flowers.

It's interesting to see what people used to use in their everyday lives, especially at a time when they would also make their own clothes and textiles or have to make all their food right from scratch, as well as the objects that persisted for centuries, such as the cawl spoon.  For some reason, I'm always interested in fireplaces.  I think because for many years they were used for more than just heating and because you can get an idea about what types of things people were eating based on what hardware was around the fires.  Unlike what I've seen in many other places a lot of the cottages and farmhouses fires only had space to put a kettle on or just one pot in which they probably cooked cawl.  However, I do know there was often a communal bread-baking oven in the villages so they wouldn't need this in their homes at least.

We'll definitely be back to have another look around, especially of the buildings we didn't get to see time around.  The only things that we didn't quite enjoy were the blacksmith and the weaving demonstrations that were happening, which were both underwhelming.  However, we might have just turned up at the wrong times.  It's always interesting to me that the number of skills that I would like to learn were in fact completely commonplace not so long ago.  So, having a look at these homes and seeing how these skills were woven into their everyday lives is always of interest.