Trev's travails: St Fagans

St Fagans is one of Europe's leading open–air museums and Wales's most popular heritage attraction. The Museum tells the stories of the people of Wales; how they lived, worked, and spent their leisure time.

It has been open to the public since 1 November 1948. The museum stands in the grounds of St Fagans Castle and gardens, a late 16th-century manor house donated to the people of Wales by the Earl of Plymouth in 1946.

During the last fifty years over forty original buildings from different historical periods have been re-erected in the 100-acre parkland; these include houses, a farm, a school, a chapel and a Workmen's Institute.

Kennixton Farmhouse is from Gower and has a thatched roof and a striking reddish –orange colour of its walls. Although originally part of a farmstead, it has stood alone at St Fagans, as the farm buildings were still in use, until they too were offered to the Museum in 2007, and where they are currently being re-erected.

The key stones from the buildings being re-erected are marked with a letter and a number ...

... and these are then faithfully re-erected in the correct places

Maestir School from Lampeter, Ceredigion.

Maestir, a small, beautifully restored rural school, is typical of the late Victorian period when elementary education became compulsory for all children in Wales and England. It was originally called St Mary's Board School and was built by Sir Charles Harford, squire of Falcondale, primarily for his workers' children.

Approximately 36 pupils between the ages of 5 and 14 attended the school in 1900 and there was a single teacher in overall charge. A pupil-teacher (usually the brightest senior girl) was given the task of teaching the infants and most pupils spoke Welsh as their first language although lessons were taught in English. The school closed in 1916.

There are a range of shops including this portrait studio and Gwalia General Stores

Gwalia Stores was originally located in the Ogmore Vale near Bridgend, Glamorgan, and closed in 1973. The shop was opened as a grocery business by William Llewellyn in 1880. By 1916, Gwalia Stores comprised a bakery, ironmongery, grocery, gentlemen's outfitter, chemist, and an animal feed store. William Llewellyn died in 1924. The shop is exhibited as it would have appeared in the late 1920s.

The Tollhouse was built in 1771 and re-erected at St Fagans in 1968. It originally guarded the south gate to Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire. It was built of local stone and roofed with Pembrokeshire slates.

The building had just a single room, one end of which was used for the collection of tolls. Because of the poor quality of most rural roads in Wales, in the late 18th century local gentry began to build private or turnpike roads for which tolls were charged. Tollhouses were unpopular with country people, who now had to pay in order to travel and to move their livestock along the turnpike roads. In the 1840s, their dissatisfaction culminated in violent attacks on tollgates and tollhouses known as the Rebecca Riots. This action eventually led to the abolition of turnpike trusts in 1864. Thereafter, county councils took over the responsibility for building and maintaining the roads.

Inside one of the workers' cottages

Stryd Lydan barn - a cruck barn; ie a barn in which a pair of curved timbers form a bowed A-frame which supports the roof independently of the walls - originally stood at Penley, Flintshire. It was built c. 1550 and was re-erected at St Fagans, in 1951.