Ryedale Folk Museum

Where could you go in a museum and see activities from completely different eras within yards of each other? Ryedale Folk Museum, of course. We had an excellent group of iron age re-enactors who were demonstrating different crafts from the period. These included wood-turning, pottery, weaving and textiles. Today, volunteers and staff were treated to a lovely dinner of stew, cottage pie, beetroot, and jacket spuds. Us blokes were even lucky enough to get a pint of Black Sheep. For afters - if you had room, was a smashing apple crumble and cream. Thanks very much to everyone who prepared that lovely meal. After dinner we got busy harvesting the cornfield. We got off to a slow start due to the weather, it was very overcast and drizzly before dinner, but we got the field done with the binder and stooked the sheaves. The binder probably dates from the 1940's, a Sunshine Massey Harris from Australia, and the tractor used to pull it is a MF 135 from the 1970's. Jonathan Severs

If you fancy cooking some traditional food after a visit to Ryedale Folk Museum, then the book Ryedale Recipes by Peter Brears is ideal. There was plenty of food around today, Kevin Sims made a ham mushroom and pea pie with jacket spuds in the White Cottage, whilst Peter was busy in Stang End with chicken, bread cheese and vegetables. In the Tudor Crofter's cottage Emma Hirst was cooking small mint pancakes, a joint of bacon and vegetable stew. As yesterday, all was made to a very good standard. Jonathan Severs