Past times

It felt as if we had walked on to the set of one of those Catherine Cookson TV dramas. We climbed the steep and narrow staircase on to the open-top deck of an early 20th century tram and were transported back into the past. We bumped along a cobbled street past an old-fashioned sweetshop, chemist, pub, Co-op and bank. Later we walked into a classroom full of long rows of desks covered with writing slates, and stooped down a claustrophobic drift mine.

This was the Beamish Museum, near Newcastle, which over the past three decades has become one of Britain's best open-air museums. Accolades have included the titles British Museum of the Year and European Museum of the Year. So while it's a good 90 minutes' drive from York, I reckon it's well worth the journey.

Beamish tells the story of the people of north-east England at two points in history - 1825 and 1913. But this is no museum with exhibits behind glass cases. History comes alive as you walk from building to building across a 300-acre site. Most of the buildings have been rescued from around the region, dismantled and then transported to Beamish and re-built.

A complete colliery village, circa 1913, has been re-created, from a colliery winding engine house and pithead to austere pitmen's cottages. There's the village school, brought to Beamish from nearby East Stanley after it closed down a decade ago. Then there's a Wesleyan Methodist Chapel.

But the most dramatic moment comes as you go down an old drift mine that existed on the site and has been re-opened to show how coal was worked in the days before mechanisation and to lay bare the incredibly tough life of the miner. It's dark and claustrophobic down there, and I was almost bent double at one point because the roof was so low.

A farm, which also existed on the site in a derelict state, has also been fully restored, and the shorthorn cattle, Saddleback pigs, hens and geese were of great interest to my daughter.

In the farmhouse kitchen, the "farmer's wife" - one of a number of costumed museum staff who play historical parts across the site - sat in her chair darning.

Beamish town is dominated by a row of Georgian houses, originally Ravensworth Terrace in Gateshead, built between 1830 and 1845. There's the Sun Inn, originally a Bishop Auckland pub dating back to the 1860s and with an interior re-built much as it was originally.

We visited a dentist's surgery full of cruel-looking instruments of tooth torture, called in at the newspaper office and went into the sweet shop to buy traditional sugared almonds and cinder toffee which had been hand-made at the back.

It never stopped raining throughout our four-hour visit, but even the atrocious weather could not entirely dampen our enjoyment of an excellent museum.

Fact file

Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum,

County Durham, DH9 0RG.

Tel 01207 231811.

Website: www.beamish.org.uk.

Open: daily 10-5 (last admission 3pm).

Cost: Adult: £10, child (5-16) £6, OAP £7. Under 5s free. Tram rides free.

Parking free.

To get there: By car, take A59 out of York and then A1 northbound. Leave A1(M) at Junction 63, following signs for Beamish, and go four miles along A693 towards Stanley. By train: take GNER from York to Durham or Newcastle. Service buses run from both stations to Beamish.

PICTURE: Inside the grocery department of the Co-op at Beamish