Yorkshire Farming Museum

I've just got back from a visit with Siobhan, one of my support workers, to the Yorkshire Farming Museum at Murton to the east of York. We both found the place to be quite disappointing; the concessionary admission price is £5.50 and we spent barely an hour there. There are a few tractors and old pieces of farm machinery, some in not very good condition...and all of them poorly displayed. I was particularly disappointed not to see any tractors or combined harvesters which were made at Doncaster by Massey Ferguson, and then later International Harvesters, for many years.

There were some static displays inside a couple of buildings, a small petting farm and a wildlife trail...oh, and a dovecote which had been removed from a nearby stately home and re-built brick by brick. There is also a re-created Iron Age village and a Roman fort which were out of bounds today due to a school visit - and for some unknown reason to do with the children an air-raid siren kept going off. The Derwent Valley Light Railway is also based there, but only operates at weekends.

On the way back we called at one of our favourite haunts, the Farm Café at Womersley. It was quite close to closing time and so the choice of cakes was limited. We chose the jam tarts, and a pot of tea. We thought the tarts weren't anything special, certainly compared to some of the other cakes we've eaten here - hung up on the wall in the toilet is a humorous sign though.