Ballenberg Open-Air Museum

Ballenberg is a hundred hectares of hillside above Lake Brienz onto which more than a hundred rural buildings have been moved, piece by piece, from every part of the country. A Ticino stone house stands twenty minutes' walk from a Bernese farmhouse with a roof like an upturned hull, and beyond that sit an Appenzell weaver's house and a Valais granary raised on stone discs. The point is not the buildings alone but what happens inside them: bread baked in the ovens, cheese made in a copper vat over a fire, weaving, blacksmithing, rope making and lace. Old Swiss breeds graze the fields between them, and the paths from one region to the next are long.

What you actually see

• The regional groups - houses arranged by area, from Ticino stone to Bernese timber.
• The craft demonstrations - cheese making, baking, weaving and the forge.
• The old breeds - working animals and rare Swiss livestock kept on the site.
• The interiors - furnished rooms showing how the houses were actually lived in.

When to go

The museum runs from the middle of April to the end of October and closes for the winter. Late spring and September give the best light and the fewest school groups. Come early, because the site is large, the two entrances are far apart, and doing it properly takes about five hours of walking. Craft demonstrations follow a daily programme posted at the gate.

Honest expectations

It is a lot of walking, mostly on gravel and mostly uphill, with little shelter when rain comes off the lake. Not every house is open every day and not every craft is running. The ticket is dear for a family, food on site is limited and expensive, and if vernacular building holds no interest for you it becomes repetitive by the third valley.

Nearby

Lake Brienz is below and the Aare gorge at Meiringen is a short trip east.