Buildings and Exhibits
The museum includes over forty buildings which represent the architecture of Wales, including a nonconformist chapel (in this case, Unitarian), a village schoolhouse, a Toll road tollbooth (below), a cockpit (below), a pigsty (below) and a tannery (below).
The museum holds displays of traditional crafts with a working blacksmith's forge, a pottery, a weaver, miller and clog maker. It also includes two working water mills: one flour mill and one wool mill. Part of the site includes a small working farm which concentrates on preserving local Welsh native breeds of livestock. Produce from the museum's bakery and flour mill is available for sale.
The medieval parish church of Saint Teilo (below) formerly at Llandeilo Tal-y-bont in west Glamorgan (restored to its pre-Reformation state), is the Museum's latest building, opened in October 2007 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Though the museum was intended to preserve aspects of Welsh rural life, it now includes several buildings that depict the industrial working life that succeeded it, itself almost extinct in Wales. There is a row of workmen's cottages, depicting furnishing from 1800–1985, from Rhyd-y-car near Merthyr Tydfil (below), as well as the pristine Oakdale Workmen's Institute (below). A post-war prefabricated bungalow (below) has even been erected on the grounds.
Since 1996 the Museum has hosted the Everyman Summer Theatre Festival when it re-located from Dyffryn Gardens. This festival, which includes a Shakespeare play, a Musical and a Children's Show has become part of Welsh theatrical calendar since its founding at Dyffryn in 1983.
Scenes from the Doctor Who episodes "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood" were filmed at St Fagans.
Read more about this topic: St Fagans National History Museum
Famous quotes containing the words buildings and/or exhibits:
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)