Today was a free day, when we could choose whatever we wanted to do - or do nothing, of course. It was quite tempting to stay in bed! However, after breakfast, buses being few and far between, we decided to take a taxi to visit the Museum of Tyrolean Farms. This is a collection of traditional farm buildings, all of which are several hundred years old, brought from all over the area and re-erected here. It proved to be a fascinating visit.
This is one of the typical farmhouses. This one dates from 1577. The date is known because it was displayed over the two windows on the right.
This one has a central hall, with rooms on either side. There is a stable at the back, as it was usual to keep the animals here in the winter. In this case, the stable housed 12 cows, a horse, and some pigs and goats. Another house we saw had a separate pigsty, which might have been preferable. One of the houses has food stalls which could be moved up, since the stable was only cleared out once a year. So the accumulation of straw and manure rose up higher and higher so the floor was higher and the food stalls had to be moved up as well. When it was finally dug out, a pickaxe had to be used. We tried not to think of the smell!
This one presumably had rather more frequent arrangements, judging by the gutter at the back of the animal stalls.
Most of the houses only kept a few cows - 8 or 9 was quite common. There would also be goats and a pig or two, as well as hens. Sheep were mentioned a few times as well. Most of the houses had chicken coops. We liked the arrangements for the hens in the house below.
This house has a little stair on the left for the hens to climb up at night. Their coop is inside against the ceiling of the stable, above the cows’ heads.
Maize could be grown in the milder climate of the area where this particular farmhouse originated. Those are cobs of maize hanging up to dry under the roof.
Inside the house, the kitchen would have been very smoky because the cooking was usually done over an open fire.
The bread oven was often outside
You can see this one has been pretty heavily used and consumed a lot of wood. Apparently, bread was baked once a month. I would guess it must have been pretty hard by the end of the month, if the bread I bake is anything to go by!
The parlour was usually heated by a stove, and had simple wooden furniture. Nothing looked very comfortable.
This was one of the better furnished ones, some of the houses had very little furniture.
Although there was sometimes a downstairs bedroom - especially in the case of farms where there was an extended family and the older members might be less able to manage the stairs. This was not surprising, I found some of the stairs quite difficult as they were frequently steep and narrow, and always poorly lit. In fact, all of the houses were extremely dark inside. The bedrooms upstairs were very simply furnished, sometimes with just beds and a chest for storage. This one has more furniture.
This was about the only house I saw with a rug on the floor. The spinning wheel was more commonly found downstairs, and most houses seemed to have one.
All of the bedrooms we saw had a pot under the bed. Apparently, there was sometimes a channel on the wall for the men to use to urinate at night; we saw one that went down to the lavatory at the side of the house. The women had to use the pot. I only saw one lavatory, attached to the back of the house, which I unaccountably failed to photograph, but I imagine all the houses had one.
All of the houses had very high thresholds to each doorway, you had to step over very carefully. I imagine this was so there were no draughts under the door.
There was no running water in the house of course.
This seems to have been the most usual arrangement, though there was no pump handle, so this one must have worked by water pressure. Goodness knows what happened in a drought! One or two houses had water supplied like this, another had a well.
As well as keeping the animals, people grew vegetables in little vegetable plots and made cheese. Many houses had a cellar to keep the cheese cool while it matured. Inside, there were huge cauldrons to heat the milk, as well as churns and cheese presses.
I would imagine cheese was made in most of the houses, I’m not sure about butter.
Most of the houses had a spinning wheel, but there was only one where I saw a loom.
Plenty of sheep must have been kept, judging by the number of spinning wheels I saw, but not much mention was made of them on any of the information boards. Goats were more often mentioned, and both animals could have been used to make cheese, of course.
The whole community would have had to work together to build a mill like this one.
This is an overshot wheel, with a long channel being used to bring the water from a nearby pond. There was a simple chain to pull the water channel over or away from the mill wheel. The same channel also served a sawmill in the distance as well as a small nail forge behind it.
The sawmill was quite ingenious
You can see where the water comes down the steep channel on the right to turn the wheel. The power from the wheel was converted into 2 different movements. The rectangular frame holding the saw blade moves vertically, while the carriage runs horizontally on rollers. With the huge amount of wood being used, I imagine there was some need for a mechanical means of sawing it up.
Other community buildings include 2 tiny chapels and the schoolhouse.
Obviously in the classroom here the emphasis was on reading, writing and simple arithmetic.
As well as the two chapels, we encountered boards marking the Stations of the Cross as we walked round. I’m more familiar with these being in a church, but of course the chapels in these villages were too tiny, so it made sense to arrange the Stations of the Cross outside. I don’t know whether they were permanent or only there around Easter.
I can’t end this without posting the photo of the oldest building in this collection.
This house dates back to a period between 1200 and 1280. It is what is called a housebarn, the stable being that stone built part on the left. It has the threshing floor above it. The stable could house 4 cows, some calves, 3 pigs and 5 sheep. The living quarters were on the right of the door, and all the ground floor rooms communicate directly with the kitchen. There are poles in the kitchen to hang meat for smoking.
We were pretty exhausted after walking round all these houses, which are arranged so you can follow a circuit. The circuit ends at a restaurant, so we were able to go in for something to eat and drink, before going back to the museum entry building to view some films about the museum and old Tyrolean customs, and to see an exhibition of handcrafts. Then we went down the hill to the car park where we were able to catch a bus back to Kramsach, which dropped us a fairly short walk from our hotel.
At supper, our guide explained the next 2 days to us. Tomorrow it’s early breakfast as we leave at 8 for Oberammergau, and our luggage with go to our hotel in Garmisch-partenkirchen, where we will not rejoin it until about 10 o’clock at night after the plays. Our bus will leave us in Oberammergau without any luggage as we are not allowed to take anything much into the plays.
Then we will have a very short night because we must leave at 5.45 am on Monday morning to drive to Munich to catch our plane. So details of the last day of our holiday, which is Sunday, will not be posted until Monday or Tuesday. I don’t imagine I will have many photos of our last day, I can hardly be taking photos at the plays, so it could be quite a boring post, which I might be able to do at the airport I suppose.
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