Museum staff and volunteers spent a week cleaning and polishing the period rooms before it re-opened to visitors last week.

"Everything that could be moved, washed, polished, dusted and hoovered has been – and a lick of paint was also applied where it was needed," said centre manager Alison Scurrah.

"It is very difficult to give any of the rooms a thorough clean when the centre is open every day of the year. The weeks following Christmas are traditionally a quiet time so we decided to close for a week.

"All the staff put on their rubber gloves and got stuck into the cleaning – and without the help of the volunteers we wouldn't have got through half of the jobs."

To co-incide with the re-opening, a new exhibition at the museum looks at farming across the years and especially the production of butter and honey, with tools and memorabilia loaned by the Ryedale Folk Museum.