The Cider House was built in the late 1980s to house the traditional horse driven cider mill and the cider press which the Museum had acquired from a farm near Cradley. Traditional mills and presses like these were used on hundreds of farms in Herefordshire to produce cider for the farmer, his family, and his workers. Many troughs & wheels can still be seen standing in farmyards or near entrance gates. As well as the cider equipment, there are other objects in the House as well, many related to dairying.
Cider is made in many countries. In Britain, cider milling traditionally takes place in two stages: first, milling or grinding the apples into pulp, and secondly, pressing the pulp to release the juice. In England, the horse mill was the traditional method. It consists of a circular trough made of stone, in which is set either one or two large stone wheels called “runners”. At the centre is a pivot point. A horse is harnessed to the outside of the wheel, and driven in a circle, slowly grinding the apples to pulp. Throughout the 19th century, this was the dominant method in England. By the early 20th century in Britain, however, stone mills had fallen out of fashion, and were replaced by roller mills.
After the pulp has been made, it must be squeezed to extract the juice. This is done in a cider press, which like the cider mill, takes various forms. Our press is a screw press, which was common in Britain. There are two ways to hold the loose pulp (pomace) in place as it is pressed. The first is to use alternating layers of straw and pomace, creating a mixture known as a “cheese”. The other is to wrap the pomace in stout cloth.
The video on the wall next to our cider press, filmed by David Bishop and edited with his permission, was made available with very kind assistance from Fair Oak Cider, of Bacton in the Golden Valley. Fair Oak resurrected the practice of producing cider with horse- and person-power in the past few years. The video shows their mill and press in action, to illustrate the past working life of our exhibits. For more information about Fair Oak Cider, visit their website.
One branch of the De Vall family in Leominster specialised in making hats. In the 1870s, another member of the family, Thomas, invented and patented a mechanical butter churn.
When Deborah Norberg, a descendant of the De Vall family from California, visited the Museum in 2018, she was very excited to see the churn. Although her family had kept a copy of the advertisement safe, they had no idea that an actual churn still survived!
Image courtesy of the Hereford Times
Cattle have been kept on farms around Leominster for hundreds of years. In the past, animals were not dehorned as often as they are now. When the cattle were slaughtered, their horns were a useful by-product, which could be used in many ways. Before the invention of plastic, horn was used because it was light, bendable and tough. It has been used to make musical instruments, shoe horns, knife handles, buttons, combs, boxes, jewellery, and gunpowder flasks. In the Middle Ages, thin slices of horn were even used as window panes in small windows, instead of expensive glass, because they allowed some light into the room. These beakers probably belonged to local farm workers, who took them out to the fields on hot summer days to drink cider, beer or water. One of them has a name, a heart, and the date ‘1875’ scratched onto it.
This tool is probably Victorian, but the design of it is so perfect for the job it is designed to do, that modern versions made in plastic can still be bought today. It is a berry picker; designed to speed up the process of picking all kinds of soft fruit, but especially small berries such as blackcurrants, and bilberries. The picker is held by the handle on top, the ‘comb’ is pushed through the branches of the bush, and the berries fall off and roll into the box at the back.
These two shoulder yokes were designed to make the carrying of full buckets easier on the arms and hands, by spreading the weight across the shoulders of the carrier and suspending the buckets on chains. In the days before mains water supplies and milking machines, the two liquids most likely to be carried in buckets were water & milk – water from the outside pump or well into the house, and milk from beneath the hand milked cow into the dairy. Provided the two buckets were filled equally, it was a stable & comfortable way of moving buckets around. The painting shows how a yoke was carried.
Before the Second World War, most milk was delivered to houses not in glass bottles, but in a churn or large can. The milk was ladled out by the milkman into the customer’s own jugs or bowls, using a measure like this. Glass bottles were introduced nationally in 1884 but delivering milk in individual bottles only became common in the 1920s & 30s – first by horse & cart, and later by electric milk vans. By the 1950s 99% of all milk was delivered daily in this way. There were 45,000 milkmen in the UK. As supermarkets appeared, and more customers owned fridges, daily deliveries declined, and more people chose to buy their milk in plastic containers. Milk rounds became uneconomic & many closed. Now, only 5% of milk is delivered in glass bottles, and there are only a few thousand milkmen. In the 21st century, the problems of excess use of plastic are better understood. Although modern hygiene regulations would not allow the sale of milk from open churns, perhaps we should return to using glass?