I haven’t had any great ideas recently, so this one is from last Saturday that I had while I watched my life flash before my eyes in the taxi-from-hell on the way to the airport. If I ever had oodles of money, I would buy a castle in Ireland or Scotland and set up a living history museum in the tradition of Colonial Williamsburg, Plimoth Plantation, and Sturbridge Village. The castle, grounds, and village would be fully staffed with costumed interpretors. Every employee would assume the identity of a real person from the castle’s hey day. These interpretors would mainly be history majors and traditional artisans and craftspeople who specialize in medival arts. The castle inhabitants would engage in all the activities carried out during medieval times, including holding festivals, feasts, and tournaments. There would be three main ways for visitors to interact with the castle to experience life in medieval times:

1) Visitors would be able to visit during the day and interact with castle inhabitants (asking questions, watching reenactments, feasting, etc.) just like they do in the aforementioned living history museums.

2) Visitors could book a “time travel” vacation, in which they would take on actual roles at the castle, living in the castle as medieval peasants, servants, lords, knights, whatever. Like that PBS reality show Manor House where a bunch of volunteers took on roles on an english manor pretending to live in the year 1905. But this would be a vacation for role-playing history lovers (weirdos) like me. We could even have a reality show about it! These vacationers would, of course, pay for the privilege and have to interact with the knowledgable interpretors and answer questions for day-visitors. Vacations could be taken for a week up to a couple months. Nice sabbatical activity- bring the kids!

3) The Mountain School meets the Middle Ages. What better way to give kids a deep understanding and appreciation of history than to send them to school in a castle for a semester? (eat your heart out Harry fans!) Like the Mountain School, in which high school juniors get sent to live and work on a farm in Vermont for a semester (teaching rich kids important life-skills like cow milking), this experience would put them to work in roles in the castle for semester. Basically they’d be working as interpretors, and be taught history and arts and crafts from the official interpretors. And they’d have to write some history papers and, you know, do school stuff.

Why should Ireland or Scotland take me up on this fabulous idea?

1) Both Ireland and Scotland have campaigns to preserve gaelic language and culture. This would be a great way to expose visitors to ancient arts, music, language, and history, and to increase interest in preservation efforts.

2) It would create hundreds of jobs for struggling history majors and medieval artists/craftsmen/musicians/story tellers/etc. These are the people who currently keep the ancient knowledge alive, and they need to be supported!

3) Can we say tourist dollars? I’d pay big bucks to visit!

I did a really brief google search for living history museums in Scotland and Ireland, and nothing like this came up.

Queen Ciara hereby decrees this to be an excellent idea.