The Judge's Lodging

Presteigne held the assizes of Radnorshire for four hundred years, and in 1829 it built a proper home for them: a Shire Hall by Edward Haycock, containing a courtroom, judges' apartments, jury rooms, cells and a full service floor.

Judges came twice a year, tried the county's serious criminal cases, and were housed here in some style at public expense. The last of them came in 1971, when the Courts Act abolished the assizes.

The building survived largely unaltered, and since 1997 it has operated as a museum.

What makes it unusual

Most historic house museums show you the front of a building. This one shows you all of it, and the relationship between the parts is the point.

The courtroom is complete: bench, dock, jury box, public gallery and the rest. Standing in the dock and looking up at where the judge sat is a fairly direct piece of interpretation.

The judge's apartments above are furnished to the 1860s — drawing room, dining room, bedroom — at a standard of comfort that a small Welsh county was expected to provide for a visiting official twice a year.

Below and behind are the servants' quarters, the kitchen, the scullery and the passages, which is where the majority of the people who worked in this building spent their time.

Put together, they are a section through Victorian social order in one structure.

The gas

The building is lit by gas, restored and working, and this is not a gimmick. It changes what the rooms look like and how they feel, particularly on a dull day, and it is the single most effective thing the museum does.

Very few historic interiors in Britain are shown under the lighting they were designed for. Almost everything else you have seen has been shown under electric light in rooms built for something considerably dimmer and warmer.

The county that left

Presteigne got the assizes in the 1540s and lost the administration of Radnorshire to Llandrindod Wells around the turn of the twentieth century, and lost the assizes themselves in 1971.

The Shire Hall is what remains of the town's four centuries as a county town, and the museum is honest about that. It is a building whose function was removed and which survived precisely because nothing else came along to want the space.

Visiting

Charged, seasonal opening, in the middle of Presteigne. Allow longer than you think.

St Andrew's church, with its Flemish tapestry, and the Radnorshire Arms of 1616 are both a short walk away, and the bridge over the Lugg — which is the county boundary — is at the bottom of the town.