Holiday Disasters at Breamore

The day we went to Breamore proved to be quite expensive for Jones - not because of the entrance charges but because of the accident he had in the museum.

The museum has some very interesting Rural Life displays but the machinery section in particular would seem to be suffering from lack of funding - or people to help; most of the exhibits could do with at least a wipe over with and oily rag, like this tractor.

Jones manage to throw his Nikon SLR camera, with big lens attached, at it when he was getting his digital camera out of the bag. I didn't see what happened but he'd put the Nikon on the tractor next to it and the camera strated to fall - he tried to catch it, missed but knocked it onto the wheel of the tractor in the pic damaging the camera and the lens! (don't know why he didn't put the camera down on the floor in the first place).


The part of the museum which houses replica shops and country businesses is in better condition, this pic of the clockmaker's is a bit out of focus 'cos I was taking it through the glass window.

It gets a bit depressing though when you see things in a museum which were commonplace when you were were a kid!!


You probably aren't very interested in sacks - but the Hire Sack system was a good example of fairly intensive recycling.

The hiring company had depots dotted around the area which it serviced and farmers would arrange for the hire of sacks at harvest/threshing time and collect them from a depot. Sometimes there were sacks from more than one hire firm and quite often there would be sacks with darns and patches.

When the sacks of corn (or whatever) were sold to the merchant the sacks were then returned to the relevant depot by the merchant (or collected by the hire company).

This day was showery - but we missed a showere while we were in the museum then went on up to the house (sorry no pic) but didn't go in as entry was by conducted tours - this was because the family live in the house and nothing is roped off. The problem with conducted tours is that there isn't always time to look at things properly and people can get in the way.

We did go into the grounds and found a pretty lilypond - round and formal with a fountain.

This was were I had my "disaster" - I wanted a closer pic of the flower on the left taken from directly above. When I'm using the camera I remove my specs and hook one leg through the button opening in my top.

I leant further over and the specs fell into the pond!

Fortunately the water was fairly clear and I could see the specs close to the edge. Luckily I have long arms and was just able to reach them.

Weather was still looking a bit dodgy so we scooted off to Salisbury to find a camera shop as Jones wanted to have a n SLR when he visited the Tank museum. He found a secondhand model very similar to the one he threw at the tractor (and at half the price of those I checked on ebay when we arrived home!).

There was no manual with it so he had a problem saving his preferred settings and had to reset every time - fortunately I found a downloadable manual on the web the other night and printed it off for him.