Walking back to the past

'The best museums of this kind are not the worthy local government ones. They are the ones built up by one gently crazed collector'

Last weekend we were staying with friends in the Chilterns, walking vast distances through beech woods in which the bluebells hadn't yet come out, and so thinking by Saturday afternoon that there must be more to life than not seeing bluebells, we went off to the Chiltern Open Air Museum at Chalfont St Giles. Lovely sunny day but not many people there (maybe they were all at home watching the Grand National). Still, I suppose it would take a lot of people to fill the kind of museum which...

There isn't a word for this kind of museum, is there? I mean, the kind which extends over a large piece of countryside, with reconstructed houses here and there – a barn, a toll-house, a school, a tin church, showing how and where people used to live. Most of an open air museum like this is just – well, open air. And open country. The exhibits are few and far between. Which may be the whole point, as you then walk towards each new structure with a sense of anticipation undulled by the fact that the previous one wasn't quite as interesting as you had hoped.

What is it called, this kind of museum?

I must be a sucker for these places, because I seem to have visited them all over the world, such as the one outside Belfast, the Cultra Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, which I thought was a real cracker. It was, like all the others, a lot of open country with a few buildings here and there, including a sensational Spade Museum, but I happened to go on a day when it was snowing slightly, and I was about the only visitor, so I remember going into isolated farm cottages or old school rooms, and finding museum attendants warming themselves by an old fire and greeting me with genuine pleasure as probably the first person they'd seen for hours.

"Ah now, the cows and the people would have shared the ground floor, do you see, the family would sleep this end and the cows would be brought in there...", they would say, trying to interest me terribly so that I wouldn't leave immediately and leave them all alone.

St Fagan's Museum nearby Cardiff, another very good place, is a bit like that, and so is a very strange place near Baton Rouge in Louisiana, called the Slave Museum, which reconstructs the houses in which the slaves used to live, though not the desperate way in which they used to live. My wife and I went there one day nearly 20 years ago, and again we were the only visitors except for one old American lady who was standing in front of an ancient black and white photograph of her year from her posh Louisiana university.

"I remember them all!" she was saying to her companion. "I remember her. She married and went to Europe. And him. He went into the Navy and never came back. And that one took to drink. It killed him..."

But the best museums of this kind are not the worthy local government or state-run ones. They are the kind built up by one gently crazed collector who brings things home from all round the world and fills his estate with them.

General Pitt Rivers brought home temples and native huts from everywhere, and put them in his grounds at the amazing Larmer Tree Gardens, somewhere south of Salisbury, which nobody ever seems to know about. Mr McIlhenny, of Tabasco Sauce fame, did the same at his exotic estate at Avery Island in Louisiana where, unlike at Larmer Tree Gardens, they also have alligators and snowy egrets wandering the grounds.

I can't remember the name of the woman who amassed the American stuff on show at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont – all I remember is that she got tired of her parents spending the family fortune on French Impressionist art, and reckoned you could spend far less money with just as good results on American folk art, and she was right. Shelburne is without doubt the most memorable folk museum I have ever seen, maybe the most memorable museum of any kind.

Still, Chalfont St Giles was fine in its own modest way, even if the best exhibit of the lot was the first one you come to. There it stands, a large square dark green structure, made out of cast iron like a metallic pavilion, reaching to a pointed peak. But it's not a tent from which jousting knights might emerge. It's a public convenience. And not just any public convenience. It's the very same cast iron one which was built to stand (the label says) at the Victorian tram terminus at Caversham, near Reading.

Inside, it's all wooden fittings, and palatial drippng noises, and lovely tall marble-style urinals, higher than a man, with marble wash stands waiting for you to now please wash your hands.

And it's still open for business! When you've been walking round an open air museum for a couple of hours, that's the kind of exhibit you really want to see.