Museum of Welsh Life

Hang around a castle in Wales and sooner or later you’re bound to spy some ghostly apparition or hear things that go bump in the night, and as you would expect from a city that’s been around 2000 years Cardiff has its fair share of spooky stories. Cardiff’s most well known ghost is that of the 2nd Marquess of Bute, who died suddenly one night in his home of Cardiff Castle and whose ghost now haunts the library close to where he died. Tours of Cardiff Castle take place every day, and a short journey North takes you to another of the Marquess' homes, Castel Coch. Also known as the Red Castle, this ancient building is claimed to be haunted by a woman named ...

About five miles west of Cardiff, (intersection 33, M4), first opened in 1948, lies The Welsh Folk Museum, in the quaint village of Saint Fagan's. Claimed to be one of the foremost open-air museums in Europe, it has fifty acres of Welsh cottages and other buildings that have literally been uprooted from their original site stone by stone and reconstructed in the grounds. Here, one can see how the Welsh used to live from the Middle Ages right up to the present day. Some of the cottages have only two rooms, one on the ground floor with beaten earth under foot, and a crude ladder leading to cramped sleeping quarters in the attic of a thatched roof. Many of these ...

Probably the best way to start off this review is to actually say what St Fagans is. Well, it is a village about four miles north of Cardiff, which also lends its name to one of the National Museums of Wales - in this case, the Museum of Welsh Life. As I happened to be in Cardiff on a bit of a jaunt last week, I spent a day at this site (armed with my trusty dooyoo goggles of course!). The Museum of Welsh Life is the oldest open-air museum in Britain (having opened in 1948), and claims to be the most visited heritage attraction in Wales. Occupying an enormous 104 acre site in a wooded valley, it has an assorted collection of buildings (most of which were ...