On our last visit to Penkridge I wrote about the range of activities available there, from crown green bowling to buying bulk ferret fodder.

On our visit today we found even more exciting ways to fritter away our leisure hours in the town that has quite rightly never been called the Las Vegas of North Staffordshire. By dint of careful long range planning I managed to arrive during the tiny window of time when the local heritage centre was open. Housed in a building that has variously been a barn and a jail, the heritage center has a fine collection of police batons…

… two restored jail cells…

… and some institutional bondage equipment.

Apart from prison life the heritage centre also had displays of Penkridge’s contribution to WWI and the various times the town was flooded, so we came away with a full appreciation of the rich heritage of town that is invariably not referred to as Bombay on the Penk.

On to Penkridge market, which seems to have grown since we were last there. You can still get bulk ferret food and designer scratchings, though. I got a bag of regular pork scratchings…

… and worked my way through it, crunch, crunch, until I came to a piece that was about a 9 on the Mohs Scale. I put it on one side while I worked through the rest of the bag, crunchity, crunch, crunch. Then I set to work. No morsel of pigskin is going to defeat a Black Country lad. By sucking it for about twenty minutes I was eventually able to soften up the leather enough to chew bits of it off. Of course, all the greasy pork flavor was long gone by then, but I had the satisfaction of eating the whole bag. That pig did not die in vain.

Then I found the secret bit of Penkridge market where they auction live birds.

There were a variety of species…

… including some familiar ones.

Ah, Penkridge.