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Escape to the country

At one time, rural life museums were accused of being too introspective, but many are finding innovative ways to tackle contemporary issues, says Geraldine Kendall
Running a fully operational heritage farm all year round in one of the most sparsely populated regions of Scotland is not for the fainthearted. 

But for the Auchindrain Highland farm township in rural Argyll – the last traditional farming village to survive the brutal highland clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries – it is not just a matter of tending crops and livestock, but of helping to keep the community itself alive.  

Through its engagement work with vulnerable members of the public, including disabled people, unemployed school-leavers and people with health issues, the open-air museum and heritage farm has established itself as a key player in helping to tackle the problems facing the local rural community, particularly depopulation, social deprivation and mental health, which often has poorer outcomes in isolated areas.  

“The council’s area is bleeding population and has been for a number of years,” says Bob Clark, the director of Auchindrain. “Our response is to try and support efforts that make it possible for people to remain in the area. We help them develop skills to make them more employable and run training programmes focused 
on the most needy in society. 

"We take them in and nurture and support them, and at the end we have someone who can get a job and keep it. A lot of the deprivation here is due to lack of opportunity – we create those opportunities.”  

The museum targets skills that are required in the local area; training involves maintenance of the 26-acre site and historic buildings (themselves a Recognised collection of national significance), and general farm work, including tending the museum’s flock of sheep and growing organic crops. 

Each person gains a rural certificate when they finish, but the hands-on experience of working on the land has more intangible benefits to the often-troubled participants. 

“It sounds like a terribly Victorian concept but we heal people,” Clark says. “We take them in broken and put them back together again.” This focus on social impact is one that many rural museums have been building on to ensure they remain relevant to 21st-century society without straying too far from their original objectives and duty to preserve the past. 

Similar social outreach programmes, which make the most of the unique type of work experience that is available at many rural sites, are run by the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket; Beamish, the Living Museum of the North in County Durham; and St Fagans National History Museum in Wales. 

Rural life institutions have often faced a tricky balancing act between past and present. Largely established during the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the old way of life in the countryside was starting to disappear, they have sometimes been accused of being overly introspective, too focused on preserving a nostalgic view of the past and unwilling to engage with contemporary issues. 

“There is a sense of longing for the past in some rural museums, a sense of nostalgia,” says Tony Butler, who was the director of the Museum of East Anglian Life for almost a decade before moving on last year. This is not solely driven by museums themselves, he adds, but also by audience demand. 

“It is what some audiences want – to just see horses going up and down fields,” Butler says. “There can sometimes be a gap between what we as museum professionals want and what our audiences want.” 

While some visitors may hunger for a window into a rose-tinted, simpler age, it can be a challenge to engage other audiences, as interest in rural life is tempered by the fact that in the modern world, urbanisation and a move to more intensive farming methods mean that contemporary audiences are increasingly removed from the natural world. 

“These days, people’s understanding of the countryside is based on landscape rather than work,” Butler says. “Forty years ago, there were lots of smaller farms, horses – now there are combine harvesters driven by GPS. The connection between people and the land is very alienated.” 

In recognition of this changing relationship with the public, rural life museums have made great strides over the past decade to update their practice and explore new ways of engagement. 

“We were a museum of rescued historic buildings and it is important that we don’t stray too far from our founding aims, but over the years our mission has enlarged,” says Richard Pailthorpe, the director of Weald and Downland Open Air Museum near Chichester. “We have started looking at landscape management in terms of conservation and environmental issues.” 

Connecting to the modern world 

One way in which the museum addresses those issues is by “bringing the old into the modern world”, adds Pailthorpe. This includes activities such as growing old varieties of thatch, which are then used by a local thatcher, and growing hops that a nearby micro-brewery uses to produce specialist beer, which is in turn sold at the museum.  

It also extends to the museum’s wide-ranging programme of informal learning and accredited training in areas such as timber and historic building conservation, rural trades and crafts, and dying skills such as handling heavy horses and flint walling.  

“We’re about the past but we bring the skills and knowledge from the past into the modern day,” Pail-thorpe says. It’s a way of working that inspires people’s interest in history while also keeping those skills alive for another generation – and also represents a sustainable source of revenue for the museum. 

The UK-wide Rural Museums Network (RMN), which is the subject specialist network for rural life museums, has also done much to pioneer new practice. Several years ago, in recognition of the fact that rural museums were ideally placed to engage with green issues, the network’s East of England branch received Renaissance funding for Growing Greener, a programme to promote environmental sustainability in the wider museum sector. 

This resulted in a body of work that included developing a carbon calculator with which organisations could calculate their carbon footprint, and resources to develop “green teams” of site volunteers. 

“The Growing Greener programme was very much something that rural museums took a lead on,” says Robin Hanley, the director of Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse in Norfolk and the chairman of the RMN. Gressenhall itself installed a biomass boiler and planted a wildflower meadow as part of the scheme. 

The RMN has also done much to promote the use and interpretation of rural collections in more innovative ways. Several years ago the network received funding from the Museums Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund to track plough collections nationwide and publish a guide, The Power of the Plough, outlining the potential of the object to tell a diverse range of stories. 

The guide was not just intended to help public engagement, but to reach other, less specialist museums that may have considered disposing of farming objects without realising their potential – a problem that commonly arises with large, difficult-to-store agricultural implements. 

“There have been a couple of cases in recent years of objects ending up orphaned in smaller museums, where nasty things have happened to them in all innocence because the museum has not known what to do with them,” Clark says. 

National identity 

To this end, the RMN pioneered the concept of a distributed national collection – a record that keeps track of nationally significant agricultural objects held by museums of all types and sizes. 

A similar undertaking is under way with historic farm buildings. The spectre looming behind all of this, however, is the current financial climate, which has undoubtedly slowed down progress – one museum director admits privately that the remit of the RMN was once much broader and many rural museums have scaled back their objectives. 

Nevertheless, the passion and ambition of the sector is still very much in evidence. Several rural life museums are moving ahead with major redevelopments supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). Weald and Downland has just been awarded £4m to build a new visitor centre and develop interpretation that will enable it to act as a gateway for people exploring the South Downs, England’s newest national park.

Meanwhile, the Somerset Rural Life Museum is closed for a £1.9m refurbishment and the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading is undergoing a transformation to reinterpret its object-rich collections (see left). In Wales, St Fagans, which also depicts urban and industrial history, is undergoing a redevelopment, with an £11.5m HLF grant, that will see it build a new centre for traditional crafts and skills, as well as a reconstructed iron age farm settlement. 

A key aspect to the St Fagans project is the museum’s key role in reflecting and building Welsh national identity – an objective shared in particular by rural museums in the devolved nations. Auchindrain was recently awarded core government funding to reflect its importance as a relic of life before the highland clearances and its significance to the Scottish diaspora worldwide. 

And contrary to outdated preconceptions about being overly nostalgic, most organisations are deeply committed to presenting a realistic picture of rural life as it was, where tranquillity and natural beauty existed side by side with gruelling labour and poverty. 

“We are a museum of the horrors,” Clark says. “Last year half of our potato crop failed due to blight – so we interpreted the blight. We told visitors: ‘We won’t starve today, but we would have in the past’.” This method of interpretation – using the past as a contrast that lets visitors reach their own conclusions, rather than overtly portraying modern issues – is effective in itself, Clark says, particularly for examining issues such as biodiversity and living within nature’s resources. 

“What we want to do is hold up a mirror to the past and ask: what can it teach us?”

Root issues 

The Museum of English Rural Life in Reading is unusual in that it is a rural life museum based in a busy city centre. Established by the University of Reading for academic purposes, the museum is closed to develop Our Country Lives, a radical reinterpretation of its extensive collections that aims to engage new generations with rural heritage.  

The £1.7m redevelopment will include digital content, as well as the interpretation and display of objects recently acquired through the museum’s £95,000 HLF-funded Collecting 20th Century Rural Culture programme. This enabled it to acquire more than 400 near-contemporary objects to fill in gaps in its timeline and explore the wider cultural influence of rural life on English society. 

The project explicitly aims to reinterpret objects in light of contemporary issues such as environmentalism, food production and global sustainability. The museum plans to develop co-created interpretation and is working with source communities to capture human narratives and object knowledge. 

The museum’s director, Kate Arnold-Forster, hopes the project will reaffirm the place of rural life in English national identity, similar to the position it occupies in the devolved nations. “Englishness is all about the aesthetic of the English countryside. Some of our collections like that will have a much more prominent place in the museum.”  

These include a six-foot tall wall-hanging of rural England displayed in the 1951 Festival of Britain. “It depicts the end of the horse-drawn era,” Arnold-Forster says. “It’s like a 20th-century Bayeux Tapestry.” The museum is also taking advantage of its urban setting, which makes it easier to reach a greater range of audiences.

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