TELEVISION presenter Paul Martin’s role in restoring National Trust property Avebury Manor will feature in a four-part series starting on BBC One tonight.

The programme covers the six-month restoration of the Elizabethan manor house, with rooms being restored to how they could possibly have looked at various times in the building’s history.

The styles vary from the early 1700s, when Queen Anne may have stayed at the house, up to the 1930s, when marmalade millionaire Alexander Keiller lived there while he carried out the excavation of the Avebury stone circles.

Paul Martin, of Seend Cleeve, near Devizes, travelled to China with the BBC film crew to see hand-painted wallpaper of the period being made specifically for the restoration.

He said: “We have tried to copy as much as we can from when Sir Adam Williamson lived here. For example, we know there was an eight-seater dining table, so that is what visitors see.”

The restoration of Avebury Manor is unique in that visitors will be actively encouraged to sit on the furniture, lie on the four-poster bed and try out gadgets in the Victorian kitchen.

Many of the cooking aids in the kitchen were donated by local people at a pots and pans day hosted earlier this year by Mr Martin and actress Penelope Keith – who appeared in the TV comedy To The Manor Born – and like everything else in the house visitors can try out how they work. The general manager at Avebury Manor, Janet Tomlin, said when the restored rooms were opened to the public last week, visitors immediate-ly accepted the invitation to try out the furnishings.

Dr Ros Cleal, curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum, has been closely involved with the BBC in breathing new life into the manor house.

The BBC searched nationwide for craftsmen and women who could make the reproduction furniture using the same materials that would originally have been found in the house.

There has been an element of recycling too, said Dr Cleal. The huge iron range in the kitchen was taken from a house that was being demolished.

Nine rooms, just over half the rooms in the manor house, have been restored Visitors can try their hand on a full-size snooker table in the gentlemen’s room, where male visitors would back in the day have retired with Alexander Keiller to amuse themselves and listen to records on a wind-up gramophone.