Beamish Museum

We next visited Beamish museum, which was a very big outside museum. It was set in 1913 and showed what life was like in the North East of England at the beginning of the time called the industrial revolution. The North east was very important at the time because there was lots of coal mines which they needed to fuel all the steam driven machines. There was lots of people dressed up like people of the time and told us about the sort of things they did and how life was. There was a farm and a small town with lots of old fashioned shops. We bought some old fashioned lollies - Jim got his teeth into a large toffee apple and Tom was very impressed with the sherbet lemons. We went on a very old steam train called Puffing Billy which had a amazing top speed of 5 miles and hour! And we also visited an old Manor house and saw them baking bread on the fire.

We when to an old school house and wrote on slates. The teachers sounded as though they where very strict - it made Mrs Waldron sound soft.

One of the best things we did was go into an old drift mine and saw how miners use to get out the coal. Everything was done by hand and dynamite. It was a very hard life and children as young as 14 worked down there. We also saw some old pit ponies who use to work down the mine pulling coal tubs and children as young as 7 use lead these.
I think we are lucky to be children now as life back then seemed very very hard.