About
The Somerset Rural Life Museum offers one of England's most evocative and atmospheric explorations of agricultural and rural working life, set in the extraordinary context of the 14th-century Abbey Barn in Glastonbury - one of the finest surviving medieval tithe barns anywhere in the country. Opened in 1976 under Somerset Museum Service, the museum brings together a remarkable collection of tools, equipment, vehicles, and domestic objects that tell the story of Somerset farming and rural communities from the Victorian era through the mid-20th century.
The Abbey Barn itself is reason enough to visit. Built in the early 14th century to receive tithes (a tenth of local agricultural produce) paid to the great abbey of Glastonbury, the barn stretches 53 metres in length and rises to a magnificent oak roof of cathedral proportions. The decorative stonework of its entrance porch, with carved heads, heraldic shields, and figure sculptures, reflects the wealth and ambitions of the medieval monastery that built it. As a survivor of the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey in 1539, the barn has remained in continuous agricultural use across seven centuries, giving it an authenticity and continuity that purpose-built museum spaces cannot replicate. The building itself is Grade I listed and a Scheduled Ancient Monument.
Within and around this exceptional setting, the museum's collections illuminate the distinctive agricultural traditions of the Somerset Levels and the surrounding county. Somerset's wet lowlands created unique industries found nowhere else in England: commercial peat-cutting from the ancient peat bogs of the Levels, the cultivation and harvesting of willow (withies) for basket-making and hurdle construction, and the great cider-making tradition that shaped rural Somerset's economy and culture for centuries. Comprehensive collections of tools and equipment for each of these industries, alongside extensive holdings of more conventional farm machinery, hand tools, dairy equipment, and domestic items, build a detailed picture of working rural life before mechanisation transformed the countryside.
The museum also preserves the Victorian farmhouse of Abbey Farm, furnished in period style to show how a Somerset farming family lived and worked in the late 19th century. Together with the barn, working animals, kitchen garden, and seasonal demonstrations of traditional crafts, the Somerset Rural Life Museum creates a genuinely immersive connection to a rural way of life that has largely vanished within living memory.
Categories:
Annual Visitors (2019)
25,000
Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
📅 Best Times to Visit
Quietest: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
Busiest: Saturday
💡 Visit during events and demonstration days when cider-making, willow-working, or other traditional crafts are demonstrated live - check the events calendar on the website. Spring and autumn visits in pleasant weather allow full enjoyment of the farmyard and kitchen garden.
💡 Visitor Tips
- Check the museum's events calendar before visiting - the experience is significantly enhanced when craft demonstrations are taking place. Cider-making demonstrations in September and October are particularly popular and memorable.
- The Abbey Barn itself is worth visiting even if you have limited interest in the collections - it is one of the finest medieval farm buildings in England and the roof alone justifies the admission. Take time to look up.
- The museum closes or significantly reduces hours in winter (roughly November to March) - always phone ahead or check the website before making a special journey outside the main April to October season.
- Combine with Glastonbury Abbey (a 10-minute walk) for a complementary visit - the Rural Life Museum houses the tithe barn that received produce from the abbey's estates, and the abbey itself can be seen from parts of the museum grounds.
- Wear sensible shoes - the farmyard and outdoor areas can be muddy, and the barn floor is stone. Outdoor areas include working farmyard animals on some days.
- The picnic area makes this a good choice for a family lunch stop in fine weather. The museum is an excellent combination with Glastonbury Tor (a 15-minute walk) for a full day out.
- The museum shop stocks books on Somerset rural traditions, local crafts, and related subjects that make good souvenirs and extend the visit intellectually.
- School and family visits benefit from calling ahead to check whether volunteer guides or demonstrators are available - the human element adds enormously to children's engagement with what might otherwise appear as a collection of unfamiliar tools.
Highlights
The Abbey Barn - 14th-Century Tithe Barn
The centrepiece of the museum is the Abbey Barn itself, a medieval tithe barn of extraordinary scale and quality that dates from the early 14th century. Stretching 53 metres in length with a roof span of 10 metres, this vast building was constructed to store the tithes - agricultural produce paid as a form of taxation - owing to the wealthy Glastonbury Abbey from its landholdings across Somerset.
The barn's entrance porch is an architectural masterpiece in miniature, with carved heads, heraldic shields attributed to Glastonbury's abbots, and figure sculptures of impressive quality for an agricultural building.
Inside, the vast open-plan space is covered by a magnificent oak tie-beam roof that rises to a complex of trusses, rafters, and purlins representing one of the finest pieces of medieval carpentry in Somerset. The barn has remained in continuous use since its construction, surviving the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey in 1539 when the great church nearby was deliberately demolished.
Seven centuries of use have given the building a presence and patina that no reproduction could achieve.
Somerset Cider-Making Collection
Somerset's cider-making tradition is one of the county's defining cultural characteristics, and the museum's collection of cider-making equipment represents perhaps the most comprehensive survey of this industry's material culture in any single collection. Somerset's apple orchards have produced cider since at least the medieval period, and by the Victorian era the industry was central to the rural economy - farm labourers often received part of their wages in cider as a 'truck' payment.
The collection spans the complete production process, from apple-harvesting equipment through the massive stone cider mills used to crush the fruit, the traditional horse-powered circular mills (scratters), wooden presses where ground apple pulp was stacked in layers with straw mats (the 'cheese'), the fermentation vats, and the wooden barrels and cellar equipment for maturing and storing the finished drink.
Somerset-specific varieties of cider apple - Tremlett's Bitter, Kingston Black, Yarlington Mill, and dozens of others - are documented, and interpretive displays explain the seasonal rhythms of the cider-making year, from harvest in September and October through winter pressing and spring fermentation.
Peat-Cutting Heritage
The Somerset Levels, the vast low-lying wetlands stretching west from Glastonbury, contain the deepest peat deposits in England, and commercial peat-cutting was a major Somerset industry from medieval times through the 20th century. The museum holds an outstanding collection of peat-cutting tools unique to this landscape: the specialised long-handled spades with flanged blades designed to cut clean blocks from the peat face, the wooden barrows and sledges used to transport wet peat across boggy ground where wheeled vehicles could not travel, the drying frames on which cut peat blocks were stacked to lose their water content, and the transport equipment used to move dried peat to market.
Interpretive material explains the seasonal nature of peat-cutting, the specialist skills of experienced peat-cutters, and the ecological transformation that centuries of cutting wrought on the Levels.
The collection provides irreplaceable documentation of an industry that has effectively ended with environmental conservation of the remaining peat bogs.
Willow and Basket-Making Traditions
The Somerset Levels' wet conditions, inhospitable to conventional arable farming, proved ideal for the cultivation of pollarded willows (withies), whose flexible young shoots were harvested annually and woven into baskets, hampers, hurdles, eel traps, furniture, and a vast range of other products. The museum's collection documents this distinctive Somerset craft industry comprehensively, from the tools used to cut and prepare withies through the full range of basket types made in Somerset - agricultural baskets, shopping baskets, fish and eel traps, laundry hampers, and the small round baskets used in local strawberry harvesting.
Displays explain the processing stages: cutting in winter, soaking to retain flexibility, stripping the bark (for buff or white willow), and the actual weaving process.
Examples of finished work sit alongside the tools and raw materials, and seasonal demonstrations bring the craft to life for visitors. The Levels remain one of the few places in England where commercial basket-willow growing continues, and the museum connects visitors to a living tradition even as it documents its historical forms.
Collections
The Somerset Rural Life Museum's collections focus on agricultural and rural working life in Somerset from the Victorian era to the mid-20th century. Core holdings encompass cider-making equipment (one of England's most comprehensive collections), peat-cutting implements unique to the Somerset Levels, willow-working and basket-making tools and products, agricultural machinery and hand tools, dairy and cheese-making equipment, farmhouse domestic artefacts, and horse-drawn vehicles.
The Abbey Barn building and adjacent Victorian farmhouse are themselves significant parts of the collection as Grade I listed historical structures still used for their original purpose of housing museum displays.
Somerset Farming Through the Ages
Comprehensive survey of Somerset agricultural traditions from the Victorian era, with emphasis on the county's distinctive industries: cider-making, peat-cutting from the Levels, willow-growing and basket-making, and dairying. Agricultural machinery traces mechanisation from horse-power to early engines. Set within the extraordinary medieval Abbey Barn.
📍 Abbey Barn
Life on the Farm: The Victorian Farmhouse
Reconstructed Victorian farmhouse interior showing domestic life on an Abbey Farm. Furnished kitchen, dairy, parlour, and bedrooms document the labour-intensive domestic sphere and the lives of farming families beyond the fields and farmyard.
📍 Abbey Farm Victorian Farmhouse
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.