Knutsford Roman Piekarski listens to the workings of a cuckoo clock as he begins the time-consuming task of adjusting the 600 antique clocks at the Cuckooland Museum in readiness for tomorrow’s change to British Summer Time.

The museum in Tabley, near Knutsford, Cheshire, has the largest collection of Black Forest cuckoo clocks in the world and it can take Mr Piekarski, its owner, up to 12 hours to adjust all the timepieces.

“I wish we could just stick to the same time all year round,” he said. “It just takes ages to change them all – and I have to do it twice a year.”

Mr Piekarski, 49, runs the shop with his brother, Maz, 47. Both men trained as clockmakers in Manchester from the age of 15, which is when their fascination with cuckoo clocks began. They set up the museum 12 years ago after amassing a world-class collection of clocks.

“The antique cuckoo clocks are of the finest quality, made from limited resources in the Black Forest,” Mr Piekarski said. “We don’t just have cuckoos – there are clocks with quails and monks playing bells. We also have a ‘cuckoo and echo’ – one of only six in the world. It emulates the whistles and bellows a cuckoo makes in the wild.”

British Summer Time begins at 0100 GMT tomorrow, when the clocks go forward one hour.

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