St Fagans is renowned for it’s leading open-air museum and Wales’s most popular heritage attraction. It stands in the grounds of the magnificent St Fagans Castle, a late 16th-century manor house donated to the people of Wales by the Earl of Plymouth.
The museum includes over forty buildings which represent the architecture of Wales, including a nonconformist chapel (in this case, Unitarian), a village schoolhouse, a Toll road tollbooth (below), a cockpit (below), a pigsty (below) and a tannery(below). Apart from the Elizabethan manor house of St Fagans castle, the Celtic village and ‘House of the Future’ (aMillennium project), which were built from scratch, all the buildings have been transported from various locations around Wales and reconstructed on this site. It also includes two working Watermills, one flour mill, one wool mill and a toilet(below).
The medieval parish church of Saint Teilo (below) formerly at Llandeilo Tal-y-bont in west Glamorgan (restored to its pre-Reformation state), is the Museum’s latest building, opened in October 2007 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams. Though the museum was intended to preserve aspects of Welsh rural life, it now includes several buildings that depict the industrial working life that succeeded it, itself almost extinct in Wales. There is a row of workmen’s cottages fromRhyd-y-car (1800–1985), near Merthyr Tydfil (below), as well as the pristine Oakdale Workmen’s Institute (below) and a post-war prefabricated bungalow (below) has even been erected on the grounds.
The museum holds displays of traditional crafts with a working blacksmith’s forge, a weaver and a miller. Part of the site includes a small working farm which concentrates on preserving local Welsh native breeds of livestock. Much of the produce from the museum is available for sale. The Old Post Office restaurant is located just outside the museum grounds in the village of St Fagans.
