FIRST time in – oh – centuries, we have been to Beamish Museum, and might have aged a few more years in the queue to get in.

Lest it scare the horses, stoically ploughing the straight and narrow down the bottom field, we shall return to the matter of admission charges a little later.

The particular problem as the years fast forward, of course, is that the likes of us tend so effortlessly to merge with the background that we’re mistaken for one or more of the more antiquated exhibits.

A little lad in the pit village underlines the age gap. “Dad,” he says, “this is 20 blooming million years old.”

His dad, who must be at least 30, smiles benevolently. “Maybe not quite that old,” he says.

It’s the Sunday of the Tyne-Wear football derby, and though the outing isn’t purposely to escape the more rabid expressions of football fanaticism, it serves that benefit very well.

None wears Sports Direct stripes, nor their red-and-white equivalent. None has electronic listening devices hanging feebly from his ear.

The elderly and the egregious wear baseball caps, the young generally go bareheaded. Unlike Beamish Museum, baseball caps are old hat.

BEAMISH Open Air Museum, as generally it is known, occupies a 300-acre site near Stanley in County Durham and was the brainchild of Frank Atkinson, a lovely man who had been director of the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. The museum, he said, should reflect the lives of ordinary people.

He came to Beamish in 1970, introduced a policy of “unselective collecting” – they’d have owt, in other words – originally had a staff of just three.

The Queen Mother came in 1975, Sir John Betjeman opened Rowley station – rebuilt from a site near Consett – Lord Montague of Beaulieu opened the garage and, ten years ago, the Duke of Kent opened the wonderfully rebuilt Masonic Hall. The duke, as a recent column noted, is the Grand Head Lad.

By 1978, Beamish had attracted its millionth visitor; by 1987, it was European Museum of the Year.

Its charm and its alchemy are that it is instantly immersive, seamlessly stitching the generations. It’s a place to which it’s not just easy to relate, but where you half-expect to see your old granddad shuffling down the back lane with a barrow-load of pig muck.

Among the ongoing projects is a 1950's village, with a community hall from Leeholme, near Bishop Auckland, and designed really to make some of us feel part of the furniture.

Trouble is, we can almost relate to the Victorian stuff, too, though occasionally the modern world intrudes. We’ve lost one another in the old pit yard, prompting a call between mobile phones.

She can see me, I can’t see her. “Right a bit, left a bit,” she says, before realising that she sounds like Bernie the Bolt. Bernie the Bolt’s history, too.

AN old school blackboard in the entrance building candidly announces what’s not on offer. Rowley station is – well – stationary, the galloping horses won’t be going anywhere fast. There’s very much else by way of compensation.

The pit village is perfect: the sort of place where everyone’s Auntie Gertie used to live. There are pot dogs and proggy mats, stuffed birds and real cats. The cats – Clippy, after the mat, and Tilly, after the lamp – seldom move from the amiable fireside. They seem not to go hungry, either.

Upstairs they’d crowd four or five to a bed and, on occasion, look beneath it. The lady of this house recalls that her student job as a chamber maid really did involved emptying chamber pots; my old dad called them Edgar Allans, for reasons which may not immediately be obvious, but had best be left to the imagination, nonetheless.

There’s a board school in which the desks seem pretty similar to those in Timothy Hackworth Junior Mixed and where a notice announces that Nurse Hodgson will be visiting on Thursday to inspect the heads of the girls.

What’s the betting the nurse was called Nora?

There’s a primitive Primitive Methodist chapel – “Cadets of Temperance, Rock of Safety section” proclaims a teetotal banner – and everywhere coal fires and someone, reassuringly, to top them up.

Since 2011, there’s also been a coal-fired fish and chip hut – a very big hut and thus not easily confused with Berrriman’s fish and chip van from Spennymoor, immortalised by Norman Cornish and itself on site.

The fish and chips are terrific, scadding hot and smokey joed. They’re £6.95, come wrapped in a facsimile copy of the 1913 cricket scores. For twice the price a few days later, fish and chips in a posh pub simply weren’t half as good.

Thereafter up to the old town, fast expanding, and for a pint with which to wash down the fish and chips at the Sun Inn, rebuilt brick by brick from its original site in Bishop Auckland.

“No hawkers,” says a sign on the wall, but we sneak in, anyway.

The town has a restored branch of Barclay’s, the Masonic Hall, where Backworth Male Voice Choir has just finished a concert, an evocatively recreated branch of Annfield Plain Co-op with adverts for Wincarnis (“the world’s greatest wine restorative”) and for penny bags of blue.

The lady recalls, with undying amusement, the occasion on which her mother-in-law discovered that a blue bag was 60p.

There’s also a recreated newspaper branch office which we decline to enter – partly because it’s the opposition, partly because you never know who might be propped up in the corner, still covered in carbon paper.

A passing polliss, like him from Trumpton, spots a Suffragette and gives chase. “Deeds not words,” she cries as she’s led away.

Though goodness knows what they make of it all, the youngsters appear to enjoy the experience every bit as much as those to whom it just seems like yesterday. After five hours, we’ve barely scratched the mahogany veneer.

Among the great things about Beamish, however, is the admission prices mentioned all that time ago at the top of the column. Though adult entry may be £18.50, two seniors are admitted for £27.50 – with Gift Aid – and all tickets embrace entry for the next 12 months.

The one you have to go back for? Beamish Museum may be one of history’s best bargains.