NEW-STYLE history lessons are being served up for primary schoolchildren visiting Gawthorpe Hall.

They will find out what like was like for Victorian servants by joining actors playing the parts of butlers and the housekeepers at the hall in Padiham.

Activities are based on the historic day-to-day records and have been devised by the Lancashire Museum Service to Schools.

Visiting children are met by the butler and taken to the kitchen to help make dinner before climbing the servants' stairs into the dining room to learn how to lay place settings and fold napkins.

Later, the housekeeper takes charge and the children become housemaids and oddmen for the second floor bedrooms, where fires they have to fetch water and lay fires.

Museum education officer David Chadwick said: "A visit to Gawthorpe Hall can now provide a stimulating experience of the way of life of the servants in a large Victorian house, while illustrating the fact that houses were built for two separate families."

The hall was built for the Shuttleworth family between 1600 and 1605 and was restored and improved in the early 1850s by the architect Sir Charles Barry.

It is now owned by the National Trust and is administered by the county council.

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