Beamish: Living History

The Saturday after Fountains Abbey, Esther and Neil met us at the B&B/inn/hotel thing we were staying at.

After breakfast, we headed off to Beamish, a kind of museum.

Unlike your typical museum, however, it was a replica of a coal mining town.

Kind of like Barkerville (except coal, not gold), for my British Columbian readers.

It was really quite impressively large.

We started out down by the mine. 

I didn't get any pictures of this part, but we actually went down an old mine shaft. 

Thankfully, we were all wearing hard hats, because the roof of the shaft became lower and lower, until we almost had to crouch.

The especially tall people in the group had some trouble with that.

You could hear the dull thuds and scrapes of their hard hats as they bounced off the roof.

It was cold and damp and dim. 

At one point, the guide flicked off the low electric lights, plunging us into an oppressive darkness that was barely alleviated by the tiny traditional miner's lamp he was carrying.

Stifled squawks came from various points around our ragged little semi-circle.

Apparently, miners had to taste the rocks they loosened to determine if they were coal or not as it was too dark to see the difference.

Little black engine that was used to haul the coal away.

The church.
There was a choir concert there.
We listened to about three songs before the boys got all squirmy and then we left.

Vegetable patches in front of the miners' quarters.

Space was a valuable commodity.

This was in one of the more wealthy of the cottages.
Probably belonging to one of the manager types.

The living room doubled as a bedroom.

Mrs. C and the School House.
Oh, and Esther and Neil.

James practicing his penmanship.
Wrong hand, Master Howie!

The very studious-looking teacher, complete with apple.
I felt creepy taking such a close-up.
Is it creepy?
Meh. Maybe. Oh well.

Recess!

:D

Awesome giant insect posters!

Tearooms!
We stopped here for lunch.

There were seven of us crammed into this teeny tiny, old-fashioned little booth.
There was much elbow-jostling.

Downtown Beamish

Shopping!
Inside the general store.

We lost Neil and Mr. C in this part for a while...

James the Bus Driver.

...And his colleague, Thomas.

Inside the bank.

Bank manager's office, where the fate of all those loans hung in the balance.

Behind the teller cages.

He's making candy!
He mixed hot sticky stuff with food colouring, then twisted and swirled the two colours together.
Then, pulling lumps off, he fed it through this thing that looks kind of like a pasta maker.
It looked like sheets of colourful bubble wrap.
Once the strips were cool enough, he dropped them onto the counter and they shattered into hundreds of little roundish candies.
Yay for free samples!

Blacksmith in the livery stable.

Harnesses.
They smelled all nice and leathery and horsey.

In the post office.

The printer's.

In the Sun Inn.

In the house of one of the more "upstanding" citizens in the actual town,
not the mining village.
The doctor's or lawyer's or banker's?
Can't remember.

Downstairs in one of the better houses.

This was the dentist's office.
He had his practice right in his living room!
The "dentist" was at home, and was regaling a rapt audience with horrible tales
of turn of the century dentistry practices.
Apparently, most people had their remaining teeth pulled and bought a set of dentures by their early twenties.
It made me very grateful for my pearly whites, still firmly attached to my gums.

He made his own false teeth yet too!

Nursery

:)

One of the trams that went between the town, the pit village, the farm, and the manor house.

This was my favourite tram.
One of the drivers was a stately, regal looking old gentleman
who stood at the helm of his tram like a captain on his ship.

Thumbs up, Mr. C!

Pay here for your merry-go-round tickets!
(And a couple of other things, but the merry-go-round was the coolest.)

James and Tom.

The farm vegetable patch.

So perdy.

Inside the farm house.

The Dairy

The Manor gardens.
Sorry for the lack of pictures from about here on.
My camera battery was low, as was mine.
I was still feeling the effects of whatever bug I had in Cardiff and Bath.

The Manor House seemed older than the rest of Beamish.
The town itself is supposed to be Edwardian,
but I think the Manor dates from a little earlier than that. Georgian, maybe?
It was dim and smokey inside, with all these tiny little rooms tucked into corners and under eaves.

I forget what was so significant about this train.
I think it was really fast for its time, or something like that.
It was called the "Steam Elephant."