Cotswold Farm Wagon

A sentimental journey (or rather, stopover) on the first leg of our return journey to NE Scotland: the Old Prison by the Crossroads at Northleach, Gloucestershire, where I worked many years ago in my (relative) youth, helping to set up what was then known as the Cotswold Countryside Collection at the site. This wagon - along with many others, and a plethora of smaller farming equipment from the era of 'horse power' - was part of what came to be known as the Lloyd-Baker Collection, put together by Miss Olive Lloyd-Baker at Hardwicke Court, just south of Gloucester. I was initially involved in the cataloguing of the collection at Hardwicke Court after it passed into the care of the Cotswold District Council Museums Service following her death in 1975. I later moved on to take part in the actual restoration of numerous objects that later went on show when the museum opened to the public in about 1980. (The whole history of the collection, and its move to form the nucleus of the original display at Northleach, can be read here.)

The original museum was closed by the Council in the past decade, and the Old Prison site was put on the market in 2011: it was eventually sold in 2013 to a Trust who have now reopened the site once more as a tourist attraction.

It was eerie looking round, to see how much was familiar to me from my time there in the 'Old Days' of the late 1970s and early 1980s - and how much has disappeared. (Overall, whilst the bigger items remain on display outside, the smaller hand tools and indoor items seem to have vanished from public view.)