The Marton Museum of Country Bygones
About
The Marton Museum of Country Bygones is a village museum in south Warwickshire devoted to the tools and equipment of rural life, and it exists because a group of local people noticed, at more or less the last possible moment, that the objects of everyday agricultural work were being thrown into skips.
It is easy to underrate a collection of this kind. A room of hand tools, dairy equipment and kitchen implements looks at first like an accumulation of old iron. Look properly and it is a record of an entire vanished labour system. Almost every object in the museum represents a specific skilled job that somebody in this parish once did by hand: hedging, thatching, ditching, shoeing, wheelwrighting, butter-making, hand-milking, laundering, brewing, harvesting with a scythe. Most of those jobs disappeared within a single lifetime, between roughly 1920 and 1970, as the tractor, the milking machine, mains water and mains electricity arrived in the English village in quick succession.
The collection covers agricultural implements and horse gear, the tools of the blacksmith, wheelwright and carpenter, dairy and laundry equipment, and a domestic kitchen display of the sort of range, coppers and utensils that a farm cottage would have used. Much of it was given by families in and around the village, which means the provenance is local and specific rather than bought in.
The practical arrangements are modest and should be understood in advance. The museum opens on Sunday afternoons for two hours through the summer, from the end of May to late September, and that is its regular public opening. Beyond that, private group visits and individual appointments can be arranged on any day of the week by contacting the museum, which is a genuinely generous offer from a small volunteer operation.
The Heritage Open Days weekend in September is the museum at its fullest, with extended hours, demonstrations, family activities and teas served from the pavilion. There is parking next to the museum, wheelchair access and a disabled toilet.
Two hours a week across four months of the year sounds discouraging, until you realise the volunteers will open the place up for you on any day you care to telephone. Museums of this kind survive on exactly that willingness.
Categories:
Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Regular opening is Sunday afternoons only, 14:00 to 16:00, and only from the end of May to late September. That is two hours a week for four months.
- Outside that window, ring 01926 632936 and arrange a visit — the museum offers private group visits and individual appointments on any day, which is unusually accommodating.
- Pre-booking is not needed for the summer Sunday openings; just turn up.
- The Heritage Open Days weekend in September is the best time to come: much longer hours, demonstrations, family activities and teas from the pavilion.
- Parking is free and immediately beside the museum, which is just as well because public transport to Marton is thin.
- Talk to the volunteers about individual tools. Many have farming backgrounds and can explain what an unlabelled implement was actually for.
- Wheelchair access and a disabled toilet are provided, which is better than most village museums of this size.
- Walk down to Marton Bridge and the River Leam afterwards; it takes five minutes and sets the collection in its landscape.
Highlights
Agricultural Hand Tools
The core of the collection is the hand equipment of arable and mixed farming before mechanisation: scythes, sickles, reap hooks, hay knives, dibbers, seed fiddles, flails, forks and rakes, in the bewildering variety of regional patterns that the trade produced. Each was made for one specific operation, and several for operations that no longer exist in any form.
What the display conveys, better than any account of agricultural history, is how much of the year's work was done by human muscle applied through a shaped piece of steel on an ash handle.
Regional patterns varied so widely that a Warwickshire hook differs visibly from a Kentish one.
The Kitchen Display
The recently refreshed kitchen display reconstructs the domestic working space of a farm cottage or small farmhouse: the range, the coppers, the irons, the bread and dairy equipment and the accumulated batterie de cuisine of a household that produced most of what it ate. It is the part of the museum that visitors linger in longest, partly because domestic objects invite recognition in a way that field tools do not, and partly because it makes the sheer quantity of unpaid labour involved in running such a household unmistakably plain.
The range would have been lit before dawn and rarely allowed to go out.
The Blacksmith and the Wheelwright
Every village of any size supported a smith and, usually, a wheelwright, and the museum holds the tools of both. Wheelwrighting in particular was among the most demanding of the country trades: building a wooden wheel that would carry a loaded cart over rough ground for decades required understanding of timber, geometry and shrink-fitting iron tyres, and was learned over a long apprenticeship.
The tools survive; the craft, in any working sense, does not.
Displays of smithing equipment sit alongside, covering shoeing, ironwork and the repair of everything else in the parish. The last working village wheelwrights gave up within living memory.
Dairy and Butter Making
Before milk was collected in bulk by tanker, dairying was done on the farm and largely by women: hand-milking, separating, churning, butter-working and cheese-making, using equipment that had to be scoured obsessively because the whole process depended on cleanliness that no chemistry was available to guarantee.
The museum's churns, butter workers, scales, prints and dairy utensils record a skilled trade that vanished with the milking machine and the bulk tank within about thirty years, taking a considerable body of practical knowledge with it.
Butter prints carried a farm own mark, which functioned as a brand.
Collections
The museum holds the tools, implements and equipment of rural life in south Warwickshire before mechanisation, most of it donated by families in and around the village so that the provenance is local and often documented.
Holdings cover agricultural hand tools for arable and hay work, horse gear and harness, the tools of the blacksmith, wheelwright and estate carpenter, dairy and butter-making equipment, laundry and domestic household equipment, and a reconstructed farm kitchen with its range and utensils. The collection's period runs broadly from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, ending as the tractor, the milking machine, mains water and mains electricity displaced hand labour from the English village.
Interpretation is provided by volunteers, several with direct farming or family connections to the objects on display.
The Working Year
Agricultural hand tools, horse gear and the equipment of hedging, harvesting, ditching and carting, covering the labour of a mixed Warwickshire farm before mechanisation.
House, Dairy and Workshop
The reconstructed farm kitchen, dairy and laundry equipment, and the tools of the village blacksmith, wheelwright and carpenter.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.