A trip to a Sussex Museum

Houses often have faces. Sometimes they look happy, sometimes sad, occasionally grumpy or even scary. They sometimes also have a feel to them. A good warm feeling or a cold hard one. Maybe the feelings are the echoes and memories of those who have lived in them. All those moments of energy in one place. So many layers of laughter, tears, birth and death. This house doesn't look happy or sad to me, maybe a little unsure or slightly worried? I like this house, the inside had a good warm feeling. It reminds me of the simple houses that children draw. It reminds me also of a children's TV series that I can remember from childhood. I must have been very young as I remember that it scared me a little and it has stayed with me for years. All I could remember of it (until recently) was that it was about a house with someone trapped upstairs. They were trapped upstairs because there was no staircase. It's only recently that I found out what the TV series was, by searching on youtube. 

I came across this house at the Weald and Downland open air museum a couple of weeks ago.  

The Museum is just outside of Chichester in West Sussex. It's home to a number of old buildings that were rescued instead of being demolished from various places in Sussex and the Eastern surrounding counties. I love old buildings so this has been on my list of places to visit for a while now.

“The old house had a thousand doors in it.

All old houses do. You can see them if you know how to look: the noontime shadow of a windowpane crawling with intent across a floor; unmeasured angles of wall meeting wall; fireplaces grown chill with unused years. Archways with unseen contours you can trace with a finger in the cracks as brick grinds against brick in settling walls. Some nights, and some houses are doorways entire, silhouettes against the evening's last light black on black like an opening into a darker sky. You just have to look. An eye-corner glance will do, if you don't turn and stare and explain it away.”
~ Michael Montoure

 

“It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years.
Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life?

And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human.” 

~Nora Roberts  Key of Knowledge

This one below is an old market hall.

Just as beautiful on the inside, as the outside.

As well as houses I also spied a beautiful gaggle of geese. 

And this handsome fella and his friends...

It was a bitterly cold day and the fires lit inside some of the cottages were very appreciated. 

There are many other buildings and things to see, but the tudor style is where my heart lies hence the pictures. It's a lovely place to visit, I would like to return when it is a little warmer though and next time I will hopefully get to look in the little gift shop which sadly had already closed by the time we had finished looking around.  

Back at home amid our local beautiful timber framed buildings, the time had been turned back and a whole street transformed for Shakespeare and his friends. A new tv series about 'Will' the young William Shakespeare. I felt very much at home amid all these props. It was a visual delight.

Wouldn't it be fabulous if it was a permanent fixture, so much better than parked cars don't you think? ;) 

The talisman that I showed in progress in my last post are now finished and in the shop here.  Over half of them have sold already, so make haste my dear friends, if you were hoping to snaffle one up. 

Have a magical week. 

X