St Fagans National History Museum

St Fagans National History Museum stands in a village west of Cardiff, on the grounds of a 16th-century Elizabethan manor house. More than forty buildings from across Wales have been re-erected here, each showing a different period or craft. The site includes working farms, mills, forges and a medieval church brought stone by stone from Llandeilo Tal-y-bont. The museum began in 1948 as the Welsh Folk Museum, founded by Iorwerth Peate after the Earl of Plymouth donated the castle and land. In 2011 Which? magazine named it the UK’s favourite visitor attraction. A £30-million redevelopment finished in 2018 added three new galleries, a workshop with Stone Age tools, and a restored main entrance. In 2019 the Art Fund awarded it Museum of the Year. Visitors walk through a nonconformist chapel, a schoolhouse, a tollbooth and a pigsty, each furnished for its time. Traditional crafts are shown live: blacksmiths shape iron, potters turn clay, weavers pass the shuttle. A working farm keeps rare Welsh breeds, and the bakery sells bread from its own flour mill. The medieval church of Saint Teilo still holds Christmas and Easter services in its pre-Reformation arrangement.