Richmondshire Museum

Richmondshire Museum occupies the heart of Richmond, one of the finest Georgian market towns in England, and serves as the principal repository for the history of the surrounding area — a landscape of exceptional beauty encompassing the Yorkshire Dales, Swaledale, Arkengarthdale, and the upland country running north to the Tees. The museum was established in 1968 and has built one of the most comprehensive collections of Dales material culture outside of the Dales Countryside Museum at Hawes.

The centrepiece of many visitors' experience is the original set for the BBC television series The Darling Buds of May — the interior of Larkin's farmhouse kitchen as it appeared in the early 1990s production starring David Jason and Catherine Zeta-Jones. This remarkably intact set, preserved and displayed in the museum, connects an enormous television audience to the Richmondshire area and gives the museum a warm, accessible quality that draws visitors who might not otherwise choose a local history museum.

Beyond this celebrated exhibit, the museum's permanent collections cover the full sweep of Richmondshire's distinctive history. Lead mining in Swaledale and Arkengarthdale was one of the most important industrial activities in the Yorkshire Dales from Roman times through to the late nineteenth century, and the museum holds extensive material on the technology, social organisation, and environmental impact of this trade. The smelting mills, bouse teams, and hushing operations that shaped the upper dales are documented through objects, photographs, and archaeological finds.

The Georgian coaching era is richly represented — Richmond stood on the Great North Road and important cross-Pennine routes, and the town's prosperity in the eighteenth century is reflected in the architecture that survives today. Collections cover the coaching inns, the cattle drovers who used the routes, and the Georgian domestic life of the town's merchants and professional class. There is archaeological material from the Richmond area spanning Roman to medieval periods, including finds from the Norman castle and the town's medieval walls and towers.

The museum also preserves material on the military history of Catterick Camp — the largest military garrison in Britain, which has dominated the local economy and community since its establishment in the First World War. The crafts and industries of the Dales — knitting, cheese-making, and the trades of the agricultural calendar — are equally documented.