Chronicles of a Barns UK Holiday: York

Castle Museum

What fun! This museum was great. It was not organised into chronological order, but into themes, and this was a great surprise and a lot of fun. Exhibitions about toys, 'Shaping the Body', the sixties, Kirkgate Victorian street, Chocolate, the prison and WWI kept us enthralled.

The sign says it all!

Chocolate in York

Historic toys.

Pong!

I had a spirograph (on the floor)

Red Riding Hood

Not sure what we were dressing up as!

Like my bustle?

Loved this dress from the 50s

State of the art kitchen appliances from the early 1800's.

Soldiers and their kit: past, present, ?future.

A bowerbird collector from the late 1800's/early 1900's gifted his collection to the Museum after WWI. The collection was large enough to justify an entire mock streetscape to display it all.

Apparently WWI soldiers would put this fake head on a stick, raise it up over the trench, it would be shot then pulled down and the entry and exit points of the bullets would be analysed to ascertain where the enemy were shooting from.

Holding grenades. Ben's is designed to be thrown like a discus, with centrifugal force displacing the pin. Oli's is the size and shape of an egg. Note the ad-hoc mace: actually used in hand to hand combat in trenches much more than bayonets ...

... and when you consider the body armour and helmets available to the German troops, it's apparent that hand-to-hand combat equipment hadn't really progressed in the previous 1500 years or so.

Merchants Adventurers Hall is a medieval guildhall built in 1357 is the largest timber framed building in the UK still standing and being used for its original purpose ... and still owned by the founding organisation. This building was just lovely - right down to the creaky flooring! The "Company of Merchant Adventurers" was originally a guild for wool merchants. Under the Tudors, it gained its current name and became a mutual support group for overseas traders. By the 1800's, it was a cartel that controlled all merchant activity in York. And now it is more like a high-faluting chapter of Lions or Rotary.