Memories of Plimouth Plantation, Massachusetts

I enjoyed reading The History Girls' blog yesterday morning. Sally Nicholls was visiting and talking about her research for All Fall Down,  her new novel about a peasant surviving The Black Death. 
She described how she visited Cosmeton Medieval Village in Wales to help her get the feeling of how people lived in those times.
This got me thinking about a trip I made to Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts, some time ago.
The 'English Village', although firmly in America, is a reproduction of the 1627 settlement, with the houses and fort that the Pilgrims built.

Interestingly, there are Native Americans as well as English settlers represented there, and you are welcome to watch and talk to them as they go about their daily tasks.
It's rather like going back in time, which I think a lot of history lovers would like to do!

This Native American is explaining how he is making a canoe by burning a hollow in a sturdy tree trunk, and the Pilgrim woman above is cooking a rabbit stew over an open fire.
The smell of the woodsmoke is my most enduring memory.


Nearby is a reproduction of The Mayflower which was an incredibly small ship to have sailed the Atlantic, and Plymouth Rock where the Pilgrims are said to have landed.
I've always been interested in the founding of America, and the first book I read about this was The Hearth and Eagle by Anya Seton, about settlers in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Have you read that book?
Have you visited Plymouth, Massachusetts?