This collection of photos shows the three "museums" we visited on the second day in Villedieu-les-Poêles: the working bell foundry, the pan, milk and lace museum, finally the furniture museum.
The products of the foundry were at all stages of manufacture and of all sizes.
It's a foundry and a workshop so the place is cluttered and very dirty.
The moulds are made from a mixture of clays and dung.
Next we went round the complex of building making up the museum of the other crafts for which the town is famous. There was an extensive industry sponsored exhibition of every kind of French cheese making equipment.
And below this is the height of craft skill that the simple canne à lait reaches when it's presented as a precious ornament.
Obviously there's a catalogue of every cheese label in France.
On into the lace exhibition.
This was fantastically skilful I thought. A member of staff did a demonstration for us of how lace is made manually. Even when she was doing it very slowly it was surprisingly fast and very difficult to follow the movements.
We ended up in a huge warehouse full of old Breton furniture. Floor fulls of the stuff not properly presented at all ...
... apart from two set-out rooms of period furniture. But I loved the old wireless set above.
Now this museum had extras, just to make it actually worthwhile really. A lot of local material relevant to the resistance in the area and the liberation of the town has been brought together and fairly well displayed. Again, it was the (totally illegal on pain of death) wireless receiver that caught my eye. The Nazis didn't mess about when there were radio programmes being broadcast they didn't like.
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