Buffalo Gap has a population of 499. It’s a charming little place set either side of a twisting lane, its houses huddled under a canopy of magnolias and live-oaks. It was here that I stumbled across Lola’s place.

Lola’s might best be described as a shack, certainly as seen from the road: a tiny place with one square window and a little door, wedged between a rickety-looking tin-roofed building and a squat timber house with a hitching-rail outside the front door.

A single pick-up truck was parked outside Lola’s, its front bumper kissing a bleached tree-stump that marked the edge of a narrow, dusty sidewalk. There was no indication that Lola’s was a café: it just looked as though it ought to be.

The sign in the window said CLOSED, but the door was slightly ajar. I shoved it open and looked inside. One oldtimer in faded dungarees and one mailman in a short-sleeved shirt were sitting at a little wooden table under a low ceiling drinking coffee from styrofoam cups. Above them on the wall were the House Rules:

•  We do not specialise in service - wait on yourself.

•  You eat what we tell you to eat - unless you’re a regular.

•  This is not a Country Club, and you do not pay Country Club dues - so don’t boss us around with that Country Club attitude.

•  Do not even think about leaning back in our chairs.

“Is it open, or not?” I asked.

“No, she’s closed Mondays. Leaves us the key so we can fix ourselves a drink.”

The oldtimer shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t have anyplace to go otherwise,” he explained. “Here, grab yourself some coffee” - he pointed to a machine by the deserted counter - “and stick a coupla quarters in the jar there.”

Yes, the mailman agreed as I jotted down the Rules in my notebook, she’s quite a gal. Then he asked me where I was heading.

“Haven’t any particular route in mind, except to avoid Abilene.”

“That’s a smart move. Abilene ain’t a nice place at all. Here” - he took a fresh paper napkin and borrowed my pen - “Lemme draw ya a little map. I drive all those county roads. I can show a real neat detour.”

Not only did he know all the minor roads of the district, but by golly he was going to cram them all in on my paper napkin if he could. He’d already covered half of it with a confused network of farm tracks, railways, and even a set of roadworks, when he got distracted by the M word. It was my own stupid fault for mentioning my interest in history.

When I made my first trip across the Plains, back in `91, I drove 5017 miles, and I made very slow progress. Well, I was young, I was eager, and I had a PhD to write up. There are an awful lot of Historical Markers out there, and I dutifully pulled over at every one of them. Out there Historical Markers rank number three in their list of products - some way behind grass, but only a little way behind abandoned gas stations, and gaining fast.

I also called at just about every museum, National, State Historical or private, from Holbrook, Arizona, to Baldwin, Kansas, on up to Laramie, Wyoming, and back through Colorado to Gallup, New Mexico, out on Route 66. I took notes on ploughs, ox-yokes, Indian pots, arrow-heads, six-guns, Winchesters, traps, coonskin caps, buffalo-robes and all the appurtenances, domestic, commercial and military, Native and imported, that furnished the needs of westerners, Red, white, black and yellow. I saw re-constructed log cabins, sod houses, tipis, authentic frontier jails, school-houses, pot-belly stoves, barns, garages, dentists’ surgeries, livery stables, cavalry forts, lock-ups, churches, Conestoga wagons, Model T Fords, railroad engines, stage-coaches, scalps, petroglyphs, and the very wagon-tracks left in the prairie earth by those early emigrants.

So when the mailman broke off from his map-making and said, “You know, so long as you’re in town you really ought to call in at the museum”, I had to restrain myself from lecturing him on the devalued currency of ubiquitous western relics. Being polite, being British, I meekly agreed that it would be un-neighbourly to miss it. I drank up my coffee and headed for Elm Street.

It’s no great curiosity to find a graveyard out west whose population outnumbers the town it serves. And because past so frequently overshadows present in this land of speculative ventures, because people so frequently abandon their homes and move on with nothing more than what they can pile in the back of the car, it’s not unusual to find a museum whose collection spills over into outbuildings, basements and adjacent lots, and soon dwarfs the town itself.

People started abandoning their treasures on the Great Plains way back in the overland trail days, lightening the load as the mountains loomed and the draught animals weakened on the thin grazing. Leaving aside the bones of exhausted oxen, the pitiful little gravesites of babies - or the mothers who died bearing them - the most likely candidates for abandonment seemed to be the tokens of a more refined life: the bureaux, the pianos, the books. More than one nineteenth-century emigrant has written of finding excellent reading material along the side of the road, and more than one has marvelled at how little these heirlooms counted for once their owners were sufficiently reduced by hunger and thirst. Later generations, destroyed by drought, or locusts, or plummeting prices for farm products, were equally unmoved by the value their grand-parents had placed on furniture from the old country. So there’s an awful lot of junk to be sifted through, and most of it is in back-rooms in smalltown museums. But I have to say that until I arrived in Buffalo Gap I’d never seen a museum that so nearly overshadowed a town in its size, its comprehensive representation of what that town might have looked like in its prime.

The Buffalo Gap Historic Village contains, not necessarily in this order, a courthouse, a jail, a log cabin, a doctor’s surgery, a post office, a barber shop, a railroad depot, an art gallery, a carpenter’s shop, a blacksmith’s shop, a wagon barn, a print shop, a chapel, another post office more modern than the first, a Texaco service station, a schoolhouse, a Marshall’s house, a trading-post, and a general store. And then there are the outside exhibits, which are several.

They start you off with an appetiser, a twenty-minute video presentation on the history of Texas in general and Buffalo Gap in particular. And for that alone I am grateful: I learned a few things about Texas which had escaped my attention. For example, having struggled to hold in check my amazement at the abundance and variety of wildflowers that have decorate these Texas byways, I now find that the whole thing is a put-up job. The department responsible for such matters, I learn, dumps 40,000 lbs - that’s around twenty tons - of flower-seed along its verges every year . But because they scatter them along one million, two hundred and fifty thousand miles of road, they scatter them pretty thin.

There’s more: Did you know - the video commentator is now casting around for alternative ways to impress upon you the vastness of his home state - that if you peeled Texas off the map and rotated it along an axis described by the northern Panhandle, Brownsville, currently on the Gulf Coast, would be in Canada. So that means - my mind’s in overdrive - that South Padre Island would be somewhere in northern Minnesota. Hey, give it a try, I say: it’d be an awful lot less attractive to the drunken students who descend on it every Spring Break, and the residents might thank you for that, even as they rush out and buy their snow-chains.

After the commentator has numbed your sensibilities with this barrage of psephological trivia, he sends you on the tour. I’ve sort of pre-empted the tour, with that exhaustive list of the buildings that make up the collection, but the wonderful thing about a museum like Buffalo Gap is that, having the space to grow, they keep cramming things in. Beautifully preserved things like the dentist’s chair - and instruments of torture - and there, around the corner, nailed to the grey, bare, wooden boards of an old farm building, an enamelled sign advertising a long-vanished brand of chicken-feed: LAY or BUST.

If you’ve never done this kind of museum in the West, Buffalo Gap is as good a place to do it as any. But don’t make my mistake: try to hit town when Lola is open for business - officially, that is, with the lady herself in residence. And write and tell me what she’s like. I’m kind of curious.