Heat shuts historic bakers

Katrina Lloyd and her colleagues were forced to close

The hot weather hit workers in an historic bakery who shut up shop because the temperatures reached an all time high.

Staff who bake old fashioned bread and buns at the Museum of Welsh Life in St Fagan's near Cardiff using a Victorian wood burning oven, decided to close up for the day on Wednesday after temperatures inside the shop reached 48C.

Katrina Lloyd, 37, and her three colleagues, were making a batch of the Welsh fruit cake, bara brith, in the 103-year-old oven which hit 204C, when the heat became too much for them.

"If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," she said.

"We just couldn't carry on any more - the heat was simply insufferable.

Baking these days is relatively cool and easy compared to the old way of doing it Katrina Lloyd

"We work at high temperatures all the time, but this was just too much."

The bakery, which is one of the main attractions of the open air museum, was originally built in Aberystwyth in 1900.

It was moved brick-by-brick 17-years-ago to the site which relocates historic buildings including shops, churches and houses to recreate past times.

The bakery sells freshly cooked bread made using traditional methods in the ovens which burns dozens of logs every day to stoke up the heat.

"Baking these days is relatively cool and easy compared to the old way of doing it," said Ms Lloyd.

"But visitors love our methods which turns out really tasty bread.

"But it was so sticky that we couldn't carry on any more," she added.