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Something’s afoot in the 15th-century kitchen at Glastonbury Abbey. Not content with slaughtering her own sheep to make mutton broth, woollen breeches and string from the stomach lining, Alice the cook is turning her attention to ye olde medicines.

“She wanted to make an authentic medieval throat linctus,” says the abbey’s curator, Susan Strong. “But we had to draw the line there. The recipe requires ground-up swallows.”

Glastonbury is just one of many museums and heritage sites to catch the living-history bug. Up and down the country, historians, actors and volunteers are frocking up as Roman centurions, Regency footmen and Victorian jailers to live and work as people did in times past. This has revolutionised the modern museum visit: out go dead objects in fusty glass cases, and in come the spark of an anvil in a Georgian smithy and the stink of the pigpen in a Tudor farmstead.

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BACKGROUND

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• A stroll in Britain's best stately parks

• A sneak tour of the National Trust

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This Thursday marks the start of Museums and Galleries Month, with lots of interactive history planned nationwide. Many museums will host special late-night openings on May 16-18. A full itinerary is available at www.mgm.org.uk.

Here is our pick of some highlights: one especially dynamic museum for each key period in our history, including a guide to their Museums Month activities. Why should Doctor Who be the only one to go time-travelling?

THE DARK-AGE VILLAGE

Dateline: 420
Location: West Stow, Suffolk

Deep in Suffolk’s Lark Valley, on the fringes of the King’s Forest, lies a romantic remnant of Beowulf’s Britain, discovered accidentally after 500 years buried under a Breckland sand dune. This is West Stow, a complete Anglo-Saxon village studded with farms, workshops and meeting halls for feasting and carousing.

Seven of its buildings have been recreated using 5th-century techniques and best-guess architecture. Conundrums to puzzle as you wander the village include: why did the Saxons dig pits under their homes? Why no chimney holes above the hearths? And where did they go to the loo? Nobody’s sure.

Whenever you visit, there’s a nicely domestic feel, with looms whirring and log fires crackling, chickens clucking about and the charmingly authentic pong of the pig house hanging heavy. The place is even more atmospheric, however, when the Stowacynn are at home – a shadow community of volunteer villagers from modern-day West Stow, dressed up as smiths and weavers with plenty of muddy-cheeked Saxon children.

The details: adults £6, children £5; 01284 728718, www.stedmundsbury.gov.uk/weststow. For Museums Month: the Stowacynn move in on May 17 and 18. There are costumed capers on May 10 and 11, with a reenactment of Beowulf, who also hailed from 5th-century Suffolk.

THE MEDIEVAL MONASTERY

Dateline: 1420
Location: Glastonbury Abbey, Somerset

The story of Glastonbury Abbey is a gift to the excitable reenactor, featuring Jesus, King Arthur, the Lord of the Underworld and a highly X-rated butchering of an abbot.

In the Middle Ages, this was the richest monastery in England – until Henry VIII went and ruined everything in 1539. Now, its chapels and cloisters lie in picturesque decay, but the abbey’s curators are bringing the site noisily alive again.

Start at the excellent museum, then explore the grounds, stalked daily by monks and masons, priors and pilgrims, all ready to share their stories. Most of the action happens in the abbey kitchen, where the costumed cooks brew pottage, bake bread, cure fish and make candles the 15th-century way.

The details: £5/£3; 01458 832267, www.glastonburyabbey.com. For Museums Month: the dressing-up will go into overdrive on May 5, when admission will be free. There’ll be a full-scale “heritage roadshow” featuring hand-to-hand medieval combat in the abbey park.

THE CIVIL-WAR MANOR

Dateline: 1645
Location: Llancaiach Fawr, Glamorgan

It’s crunch time in the English civil war. Llancaiach Fawr Manor is about to welcome King Charles I, bloodied by defeat at Naseby and seeking new backers among the Welsh gentry. Behind the house’s 4ft-thick walls, which hide many a secret passage and marauding ghost, a full-blown Stuart soap opera is about to unfold.

There’s a changing cast of servants on duty to greet you, from butchers to bodyguards, all with fully realised life stories and a few skeletons in the garderobe. You may meet John Davies, the boozing footman, Hannah Saer, the lecherous laundress or Stephan Matthias, the scheming land agent, prone to eavesdropping on his lord and master.

It’s rip-roaring fun, and there are several mysteries to probe as you explore the house. Who is sabotaging the kitchen, adding salt to milady’s sweetmeats? And why does Esther the chambermaid wear her petticoats inside out?

The details: £5.75/£4.25; 01443 412248, www.caerphilly.gov.uk/llancaiachfawr.

For Museums Month: the manor’s May Day Revels (May 5) include costumed games and period pole-dancing; then from May 27-30, the army will set up camp, and youngsters can learn pike drill.

THE GEORGIAN TOWNHOUSE

Dateline: 1775
Location: Benjamin Franklin House, London

The tall-windowed townhouse at 36 Craven Street, off the Strand, looks unremarkable at first; but within its walls, a one-man whirlwind happened. Benjamin Franklin, scientist, diplomat, philosopher and all-round Enlightenment clever clogs, lived here for 16 years, working as deputy postmaster to the colonies, inventing bifocal lenses, measuring the Gulf Stream and mediating unrest between England and America. That last one failed – and by 1775, with war looming, Franklin had to flee or be arrested.

You get whisked through its apartments by Polly Hewson, Franklin’s surrogate daughter, while being assailed by the smells of the Georgian kitchen, flashes of lightning from the laboratory and the echoing voices of Peter Coyote (playing Franklin) and Imelda Staunton (as his landlady). It’s a state-of-the-art effects show – and one feels that Franklin, ever the innovator, would have approved.

The details: £7/free; 020 7839 2006, www.benjaminfranklinhouse.org. For Museums Month: a one-off evening opening on May 16 will combine the son et lumière tour with a grisly examination of bones found in Franklin’s basement; price £10, with wine.

THE VICTORIAN COURTHOUSE

Dateline: 1831
Location: Galleries of Justice, Nottingham

This one is part museum experience, part lottery – and if you pick a duff ticket, it’s the gallows.

It begins on the steps of Nottingham’s Shire Hall, where malefactors once swung for the amusement of the mob. Greeted by a court usher in frock coat, you choose a numbered ticket and proceed into the 19th-century courtroom, about to rerun the 1831 trial of George Beck, who was famously fitted up for arson in the Reform Bill riots. A playlet proceeds, with members of your tour party playing the judge, witnesses and accused.

After sentence is passed, head down some steps into the city’s caught-in-time Georgian jail, its dingy cells accoutred with original prison plunder: treadmills for labouring cons, escape ropes made from bed sheets. Here you’ll meet a scabrous Victorian screw and a sinister prison doctor, and visit the exercise yard with its 18th-century graffiti and gravestones of condemned men.

The details: £8.95/£6.95; 0115 952 0555, www.galleriesofjustice.org.uk. For Museums Month: throughout May, an exhibition examines the trials of Oscar Wilde, and there are ghost tours in the jail on Monday nights.

THE EDWARDIAN TOWN

Dateline: 1913
Location: Beamish Museum, County Durham

Ever wondered what Britain looked like before Tesco? The Beamish Museum can assist.

As at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex (www.wealddown.co.uk) and Blists Hill in Shropshire (www.ironbridge.org.uk), the buildings are the star exhibits here: a 1913 terrace rescued brick-by-brick from Gateshead, an original grocer’s shop from Annfield Plain, a bank, a pub, even a masonic lodge. They are fitted out with Edwardian ephemera and arranged around cobbled streets, with clanking trams to catch and real-life horse manure to avoid.

A community of flat-capped, whippet-wielding residents occupies the town at all times: retired pitmen guide you through their drift mine, the workers at the sweet factory hand out cinder toffee and humbugs, and (if you eat too many) the period dentist is ready with his foot-powered drill. It’s a huge site: there’s also a farm with Edwardian-era livestock, a station with early locos and a schoolhouse with an authentically sadistic master.

The details: £16/£10; 0191 370 4000, www.beamish.org.uk. For Museums Month: events every weekend, from maypole dancing (May 5) to steam rallies (May 10 and 11) and a full-blown revival of Empire Day (May 24 and 25), with brass bands and bunting.

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