: St Fagans

January is traditionally a quiet time. The thrill of the festive season has passed, and we all wait eagerly for the end of winter, but it is also a time for new beginnings. 

At St Fagans, we’re starting the year off with a bang! Over the next few months, you’ll notice lots of activity around the museum while we deliver projects to improve the visitor experience including: 

• Updating the play area 
• Re-roofing St Fagans Castle 
• Revamping Siop Losin and introducing a new range of products 
• An exciting redesign of the shop in the main building 
• Developing a new coffee shop in Gweithdy 
• Renovating the toilet block near Rhyd-y-car Terrace 

Your visit will be different during this time, and some areas will be closed. We’ll keep you updated with developments as they happen. 

Thank you for your patience while we undertake this work - we promise you it’ll be worth it! 

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Winter might seem like a quiet time in the gardens, but there's still plenty happening behind the scenes. As the days grow shorter and colder, the gardening team gets to work preparing for the season ahead. Some of the busiest areas are the Castle gardens, where we prune roses and trees, mulch the beds, and cut back the hedges.

The castle itself is surrounded by tall, thick yew hedges. These create ‘garden rooms’, small, enclosed spaces with different themes, hidden from one another. This style was especially popular in the Edwardian period. Each space had its own character, and the hedges and walls created a sense of surprise and discovery around every corner.

In the past, these hedges were trimmed entirely by hand but thankfully, we now use electric hedge cutters too!

We also work on the avenue of lime trees leading to the castle, which were planted in 1901. These are pollarded - a special way of pruning that involves cutting off the upper branches while keeping the main trunk. It’s hard work, but it helps maintain their striking shape and keeps the trees looking much as they would have done over the past century.

In the cottage gardens, we begin putting the gardens to bed for winter. This means cutting back spent plants, tidying the beds, and digging over the soil, much to the delight of the local robins, who follow us closely in the hope of finding a worm! We also add well-rotted manure to enrich the soil, helping us grow healthy, strong crops in the year ahead.

Another important job is harvesting materials for our Christmas wreaths. Each year, we make traditional wreaths to decorate the doors of our historic houses (you can read more about this in our online article from last Christmas!). To do this, we use natural materials gathered from around the museum grounds.

We coppice hazel and willow to make strong, flexible bases for the wreaths. Coppicing is a traditional and sustainable woodland practice, where young stems are cut back to ground level so that new shoots can grow. It was once a common method in Welsh gardens and woodlands. We also use other bendy plants like wisteria and crimson glory vine, which has beautiful curly tendrils that look lovely emerging from a wreath.

Even though the flowers have faded, there’s still plenty of magic in the gardens. Frost glitters on the seed heads and stems we’ve left standing to provide food and shelter for wildlife. Bare branches dusted with lichen create beautiful patterns against the winter sky. Red berries glow in the low sunlight. And if you’re lucky, you might even catch sight of a kingfisher swooping low over the ponds through the morning mist.

There’s still so much to see and enjoy as we head into winter in the St Fagans gardens.

We’re having an eventful August at St Fagans! We’ve already explored the Celtic period and Medieval times and this week we are immersed in Tudor life! 

Until Friday this week you can book to take part in interactive sessions at St Teilo’s Church, where you’ll meet a Tudor guide who will introduce you to some of the customs and practices of the times. You’ll learn about Tudor life, handle replica objects from the collection, and gain an understanding of the significance of the Church’s intricately painted walls. Our aim is to create a fun learning experience for the whole family. Times, prices and booking information can be found here: Explore the Tudor Church

You can also join the Art Cart Corner, where we’re running drop-in craft activities Mondays-Fridays throughout August. This week you can further explore the Tudor period by creating your own Tudor roses, ruffs, swords, crowns, houses, stained glass effect windows and paper dolls! The Activities are £4 per child (accompanying adults craft for free!). You’ll be given a wristband allowing you to drop-in and out of the activity space as much as you like between 10:30 and 15:00. 

And the fun doesn’t end with the Tudors! Next week, we will be getting to know the Victorians! We’ll be running Meet the Victorian Teacher sessions, and our craft activities will be Victorian themed! We’ll be making peg dolls, Victorian houses, paper cup-and-ball games and thaumatropes along with other activity sheets and crafts. Find out more about what’s on at St Fagans and book your tickets here: What's On at St. Fagans National Museum of History

There are several Tudor and Victorian buildings to explore on site, you can learn more about these here: Historic Buildings | Museum Wales

We also have fun educational resources that you can access from home:  

Iron Age Wales: Daily Life of the Celts Resources

Age of the Princes

eBook: Victorian School in Wales

We hope to see you soon,

St Fagans Learning Team

Challenge! You’ve got three days to tackle a clean of five massive rooms, open to the public seven days a week. How do you plan and undertake a conservation deep clean for reams of panelling, paintings and pots? Buff up the furniture, freshen up curtains and carpets in a mansion house built around 1580 with collections reflecting the grandeur and period of the space? Solution - with an army of skilled and specialist conservators, cleaners and volunteers, scaffolding, ladders (working at height regs noted!), brushes, vacuums, cloths, solvents, cotton wool swabs, a lot of elbow grease, stamina, enthusiasm, tea and chocolate!

At the end of June 2025, the conservation department, under the close supervision of the Senior Furniture Conservator, carried out a deep clean of the public spaces. This was carried out whilst the Castle was still open to the public.

For a successful outcome, we needed to remove the loose particulate soiling deposits retained in the hidden crevices of the furniture and fittings. This activity would have the impact of brightening the appearance of the castle display and improve the visitor experience. From a conservation perspective this annual task is a hugely important one as it removes the grime which can provide the fodder for hungry pests and mould. The presence of this grime raises a risk of biological attack on our unique collections. It also removes particulates, which in the right environmental conditions can speed up the rate of deterioration of objects in our care.

We started in the dining hall, to the right of the main entrance. We worked as a team to move objects off and from walls, decanting the smaller objects to the old servant’s hall. 

The larger objects, for example the Edwinsford Sofa, the tables and side boards, were carefully moved to the middle of the room to enable access, both the object in full and the spaces they occupy to do a thorough clean.

After three days of going up and down ladders, the fiddly brushing of fine and ornate details, lots of vacuuming and the careful application of emulsions in solution and drying oils to provide residual protection and protective layers. The clean was complete.

We hope you enjoy the finished result. The Castle is only one of more than 50 historic buildings which need a rolling programme of care and maintenance to ensure that they remain accessible to everyone.  Next time you visit the Museum, you may see our conservation and cleaning teams out in action on site. If you do, make sure you say hello. We’d be thrilled to answer any questions you have on cleaning the historic buildings and collections.