We took a few trips with Caby's family to some local landmarks, the first one being the St Fagans Natural Museum of History (I'll be linking to this site throughout this page, click them, learn something). I'm a big believer in historical buildings; they're effectively the closest thing we've got to time travel (but I say the same thing about old websites). St Fagans is apparently a pretty classic Welsh school trip destination, and given that the goal was to kinda give me a little bit of a primer into various bits of Welsh and British culture, going there was a no-brainer. Plus, it's fun!
The Welsh way to spell it, if it wasn't obvious.
(Another page with a gallery of a ton more photos up on cabycammy.somnol! Be sure to check those out—a lot of the buildings we saw, I didn't even mention on this page, and I got a lot of shots of the internals of the ones I did mention, none of which are on this page for space reasons.)
Once past the mid-century exterior and gift shop and cafe inside (we'll get back to those), we were out into the park proper. I was immediately in love with the winding little roads, hedges around my height, and all the disparately-aged buildings, which were apparently transported from wherever they were originally built brick-by-brick to the St Fagans grounds. They apparently even use era-appropriate mortar recipes to put all the bricks back together! Crazy attention to detail, I greatly appreciate it.
You can see the Workman's Institute in the distance there, plus a random phone booth. No, it was not usable. The UK doesn't even have analog landline service anymore.
One of the buildings we passed as we were walking around had netting around it; I didn't think to get a photo, but this was actually an old pub they were restoring, and they plan to open it as a pub in 2024. How wild is that? Walking around these old buildings is one form of time travel, drinking the drinks they used to in those old buildings is a whole other—I wanna see it when it's done. And maybe buy a few drinks. (I've yet to even be in a modern pub, stateside or over there.)
We started at the far end of the park, visiting the Workman's Institute. This was a little place for workers in the community to congregate, relax, be entertained, and get politically involved in the early 20th century, and the inside was pretty lovingly maintained, though with the library and places roped off. We also wandered into the Gwalia Supply Co. building for a bit, although it was super busy in there. (Amusingly, a few of the products on display inside the store haven't changed much in branding since the 1800s.)
The Gwalia Supply Co. building
At this point, I was actually furiously typing into the notes app on my phone, trying to really note down the characteristics of the buildings and the grounds. This is gonna sound kinda, uh, rude, but I mean the best by it: I was imagining the most kickass Quake level based on this little section of the park, the aforementioned winding roads and chest-high cobble walls, smashing in the general store's windows to refill on ammo and health, going into buildings filled with monsters and finding passageways and entrances into the mines underneath them. Mostly, I just didn't want to look disinterested, like I was chatting with people on my phone rather than drinking in the park. I was just autistically manic with ideas. Don't shoot.
Back on topic! After passing by a little school building and doing a big long loop through the woods, passing a prefab house and some miscellaneous extra-old buildings (nothing's more amusing than the sight of Cramble, their youngest brother, and their dad, all very tall men, crammed into the doorway of Garreg Fawr Farmhouse as we took pictures of them), we stopped to get drinks and recuperate. To be honest, my memory of the day starts to get a little hazy at this point; I know I wasn't feeling terribly great (I didn't have breakfast and I was a little bipolar as well), so that's probably why. I think we went and got a look at the little historical shops by this point, and eventually we headed back into the cafe for lunch so I could feel less like crap.
Rhaeadr Tannery
After lunch, I was really wanting to spend time alone with Caby, so we split off and had an adventure of our own through the park. I think this is where I really started to perk back up, because I took a ton more photos and my memories of each exhibit became a lot more vivid. As such, I'll be splitting this one up into section, in the order we visited them.
The roundhouses
We discovered the Iron Age roundhouses through a long tree tunnel on the far end of the park. I think we saw one other pair of people hanging out near them, so Caby and I got to go in by ourselves. These were gigantic and dark on the inside—my attempts to take photos, whether on the DSi or on my phone in night vision mode, were all pretty much a wash. (You can see photos of the insides on the St Fagans site, at least.) They are gigantic inside, though, and don't quote me on this, but I recall the domed roofs helped keep bugs from proliferating inside the house as the smoke rose up to the ceiling.
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Bryn Eryr, one of the Iron Age roundhouses. I confused myself a bunch because this roof in this photo has a completely different texture than the photos on their site, but everything else in the photo checks out, it's shaped like it, and there's nothing else on their site that resembles it. Still a cool photo though. |
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Caby and I were greatly amused by this business card that was left in the dirt in the entrance to Bryn Eryr. Unique Touch Aromatics, here's your free advertising! On a page five people will see! You're welcome! |
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Oh, and I brought Paddington along in my jacket pocket, because I had to. I will travel everywhere with that boy. I quite like that their informational plaques were in Welsh and English. I guess that's to be expected, but I dunno man, I just love seeing Welsh out in the wild even if I can't read it, and I love it when Caby speaks it. Call that the romantic in me. |
Llys Llywelyn
Probably the most magical building in the entire park is Llys Llywelyn. This is a recreation of an actual medieval royal court of Wales from the 13th century or so, and while outside, it doesn't look like much, the inside is like nothing else in St Fagans:
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It's this long hall with these striped roof supports and arches, with these tables on the edges covered in these tapestries depicting the thoughts and personalities of the kinds of officials who would've held court in it. I only got a few pictures in here because there was a dude keeping watch in the entrance, mostly to tell kids not to stand on the riser with the altar at the end since it apparently doesn't hold up too well under people's weight, and I didn't want him judging me for all the fake camera shutter sounds the DSi makes that you literally cannot turn off. Oh well.
Rhyd-y-car Terrace
I was told going into the park of a fabled exhibit showing Welsh homes in various eras making Caby's parents feel old, and we didn't find it until right at the very end of the trip, before we reunited with the rest of the family. This is a late 18th-century row of townhouses, six of them, each decorated in the guise of a different era of its existence, starting in 1805 and ending in 1985. You can imagine my excitement going into the latter and seeing a big chunky Betamax VCR slotted under the TV.
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Having seen everything we wanted to, we reunited with her folks, detoured through the gift shop, got drinks, and I picked up another plushie dragon to bring home to my family and a really nice, hardcover translated copy of the Mabinogion, which is a big collection of medieval Welsh oral fiction from about the 12th century or so (probably the most famous work it influenced is The Silmarillion). Still gotta read it! As a fantasy writer, probably could take a lot from it.
St Fagans was great. I love the history, and I love how they have real historical food and craftswork you can buy and take part in. We didn't even go into Gweithdy, which has a workshop where you can actually learn quilting and blacksmithing, or just look at examples of how they used to make 'em. There's some similar "historical living" places in my neck of the woods, but they're nowhere near as expansive. Highly recommended you visit if you're looking for out-of-the-ordinary trip destinations in the UK.
Just some sheep.