AFTER months of moving thousands of artefacts and exhibits, painting, decorating and cataloguing, Tavistock Museum is preparing to officially open the doors of its new premises at the historic Court Gate.

What could be more appropriate than locating a museum in one of the oldest buildings in the town ? Court Gate was originally the main entrance to the Benedictine Abbey of St Mary and St Rumon founded in the 10th Century.

It?s taken years of trying but Tavistock and District Local History Society has finally got the building it so desperately wanted to give its museum maximum impact and profile.

Owners of the Court Gate, Tavistock Town Council, agreed to let the society use two unoccupied rooms of the building after a realisation that the museum had outgrown its premises at the council offices in Drake Road, 150 metres away, where it had been since 1986.

It was also felt that a central location in the town would have a greater potential for tourism and community benefits.

Secretary of the history society Rod Martin said the location was ideal: ?Tavistock deserves to have a decent museum ? towns in the area which are not so prosperous have good museums and we are now catching up,? he said.

?Tavistock has so much history and visitors want to find out as much information as they can. From this site we are easily accessible to everyone and admission will be free.?

To test the water, the museum opened its library room between August and December and 1,000 people stepped through the door. An exhibition of photographs, taken from a collection of 40,000 by the late Jim Thorington, was the focus and proved extremely popular.

The museum rooms date from around 1840 and once housed a subscription library for more than 130 years and a reading room for lectures by the Tavistock Institution ? the elaborate throne which remains was for the chairman.

Later the Freemasons used the building and during the two World Wars part of it was used for storage and for books belonging to Plymouth Library.

It was in 1964 that Tavistock Town Council bought Court Gate from the Bedford Estate, after which time the upstairs rooms were let commercially, while the ground floor room was taken over by the library.

Exhibitions will feature in one of the museum rooms whilst artefacts relating to the town?s thousand-year history will be displayed in the second room.

It is hoped that the museum will also have use of the adjacent Librarian?s Cottage, which has been vacant for three years. This will house the computer equipment, bought with a £3,000 lottery grant, which people can use to scan photographs and trace family history.

Mr Martin said the main items of interest for visitors were the abbey, the mining associations and the town?s connections with the Bedford family.

?There is a shift towards looking at images rather than artefacts and people also like researching family trees,? he said.

?We aim to build up an extensive photo library and would like people to come in with pictures to scan so we can return the originals.?

The museum will be a partnership between the town council and the history society, with the former providing and maintaining the building and the latter providing the exhibits and the stewarding.

New items of interest will be one of only four signs from Tavistock North Railway Station and a model of the town centre in the 18th Century.

Exhibitions are lined up to tie in with the Tavistock Food and Drink Festival in July and the 900th anniversary of the signing of the Market Charter next year.

The Tavistock Museum will open at 2pm on April 10 (Easter Saturday) and thereafter on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 11am to 3pm.