Rufford Village Museum

Abstract

RUFFORD Village Museum, which was opened at Rufford Old Hall, a National Trust property in West Lancashire in July of last year as: “A Museum of Folk Culture and Industry: To illustrate and capture the spirit of the countryside” (to quote its constitution) is being developed by the honorary curator, Mr. Philip Ashcroft, jun., to be “an example for other districts to follow, so that in the future, each village or group of villages will have a museum to represent their life, history and culture”. In addition to Baron Hesketh's extensive collection of old armoury and other relics of medieval life, Mr. Eric Hardy has drawn up lists of the local fauna and flora which will be exhibited above photographs, drawings, diagrams, etc., of wild life to encourage people to preserve as well as observe the wild life of the parish. This happens to be unusually rich, for the flora includes flowering rush, flowering fern, arrowhead, yellow waterlily, water soldier, bladderwort and nearly a thousand other plants; there is a list of twenty-two mammals for the parish and F. A. H. Hall and E. Hardy have drawn up a list of 101 bird records, including sixty nesting species—a third of the British records. The Museum itself is a historic old timbered hall, the restored part of which dates from the seventeenth century.