Thursday 11th August 2022
Another scorcher of a day had us on a go slow in the morning. Sitting on the outside deck under the shade of the wall, my sister I munched delicious cherries. Suddenly both nieces and the two great nephews arrived and the debate started about how to spend the afternoon. Fortunately I didn't have to decide and I found myself in the car on my way to Preston Park.
It was a half hour drive past farm fields and windmills and quite a lot of traffic on the motorway. We parked up with many other school holiday makers and set off to find an ice cream. The queues put us off that option so we headed for the comfort of the cooler museum.
A lovely grand building from 1825 that was on a large estate housing farms, a quarry and brickworks. One owner, Robert Ropner, was thoughtful to his community and is featured in the hall. It was almost redeveloped in the late forties but it all fell through and the council bought the property and it became a museum in the 1950s.
The Victorian streets are a later development too and it was fun walking through the cobblestone streets and peeping in the windows of the shops. Some of the shops were manned by volunteers who were dressed up in period dress which made it more interesting.
They have great interaction items for youngsters in the museums here and I enjoyed how history is made accessible to modern times. After some Victorian sponge cake (naturally), and the walled gardens with huge vegetables growing, we walked down to the river to be just in time to watch a river boat park up. There had been lots of youngsters on paddle boards and boats and all of them had evacuated the water to make way for the boat.
We made way too, back to the air-conditioned car after a lovely afternoon out.
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