Maitland Museum

The handsome stone school on the corner of Gardiner and Kilkerran Terraces taught Maitland's children for a century — the earliest section, a residence with a single schoolroom, went up in 1877 and the school opened the following year with 106 students on the books (though average attendance, the records cheerfully admit, was 45). When the education department finally moved out in 1979, the National Trust moved in.

Today the Maitland Museum is one of the peninsula's best windows into its farming soul. Beyond the restored school building, the Cereal Heritage Shed traces the first sixty years of agriculture in the district and the evolution of the implements that tamed the mallee, while the Barley Shed tells the story of the grain that made the Yorke famous — including the first windrower ever imported into Australia.

It's run by the Central Yorke Peninsula branch of the National Trust and makes a natural pairing with a tasting at Barley Stacks Wines, ten minutes away at South Kilkerran, where the same barley country now grows vines.