My birthday started on Thursday as far as I’m concerned, since it was First Thursday – and a busy one now that the weather is warmer and the daylight lasts past the end of the workday. I’ve managed to schedule other little things for every day through Tuesday the 10th, an unusually busy birthday celebration for me, but the big one was a visit to Beamish on Saturday.

Everyone has recommended Beamish, including I kid you not, complete strangers at random pubs. I’ve been wanting to go, but was a bit skeptical it would live up to such universal praise. Gotta say, it really did though, partly due to us getting very lucky with the weather – it was an absolutely perfect day, not a single cloud, no wind, frost on the ground when we left our house in the morning but a lovely temperature as we walked around, never getting up to where we needed to take out coats off except when we eventually sat in the sunshine.

Beamish is a huge outdoor living history museum, 350-acres with half-a-dozen or so areas covering three periods: 1820s, Edwardian, and 1940s/50s – with specific exhibits in each, like the colliery, farms, and train station. We did about half of it I think, but not in great detail – each timezone probably having enough to spend half a visit on. We were there with friends, and every location had plenty of interest – plus a beautiful landscape of rolling hills. We arrived pretty close to opening time and caught a tram to the pit village, saw some pigs enjoying the sunshine, had a drink at a Gorgian pub, rode a steam locomotive, took a vintage bus to the 1950s village for lunch, then walked up to the Edwardian village for beer and a suffragette rally and small riot (they lit a fire in a postbox!). By then it was a half hour from closing time, but the passes last a year, so we will definitely be back for more.