Is anyone there?

So, August is all but over and for all the Cookies it was a month full of sun and sea and holidays. Lovely stuff, exactly what we all needed. Early on we visited the Weald and Downland Open Air museum near Chichester, a glorious expanse of green fields with very old houses rebuilt in sympathetic surroundings. You can wander into a medieval market place, take a spin around a maypole, sit in a Victorian schoolhouse and poke around railway workers' tiny cottages.


And if you still have the energy you may be lucky enough to stumble upon someone running an Iron Age cookery course, building fires and making string from stinging nettle stems.

One of the highlights for me was the gorgeous gardens recreated outside many of the cottages - herbs culinary and medicinal, vegetable plots, chickens, and designs that wouldn't look out of place in lifestyle magazines these days.


I visited this museum many, MANY years ago on a primary school trip, and my clearest memory is of this structure jutting out from a very old building:


Can you guess what it is? Apparently it's the one thing most adults remember from their childhood trips to the museum, which might give you a clue ...

No?

Well, if you go inside the 15th century farmhouse, past the richly adorned dining hall and up the stairs to the main bedroom, you'll find a cunning little doorway concealing a garderobe - in other words a bench with a hole in that sticks out over the edge of the house and acts as a primitive toilet. Well, primitive by our standards but we're assured it was the height of sophistication at the time!

Is it wrong to be amused that the privy expert quoted in Wikipedia is called Dr Bottomley?