Private Hawke's Bay museum features medieval weapons, hunting trophies

Lex and Angela Severinsen at home in front of a line-up of weapons including a ship's cannon from Captain Cook's time. Photo / Clinton Llewellyn

Lex and Angela Severinsen have racked up plenty of adventures in their 30 years together – and their home at Ashley Clinton in Central Hawke's Bay is proof.

Inside a "private museum" located on the former sheep farm, which has been in Lex's family for more than a century, there are hunting trophies collected from the plains of Africa to the wilds of Northern British Columbia.

Also dotted around the property are an arsenal of military weaponry from ancient Roman and medieval times, including a trebuchet (a type of catapult) with a 13m-tall slinging arm that can hurl 40kg items hundreds of metres across the property; a triple crossbow that Genghis Khan would have been proud of; and a "6-pounder" ship's cannon from the days of Captain Cook.

The couple have reverse-engineered many of the weapons and built them themselves, with their two children.

Many of the hunting trophies inside the museum belong to Lex's father, who in the prosperous 1950s rode the sheep's back to far-flung places such as Africa to hunt lions and leopards.

Many others belong to Lex, who, not surprisingly, inherited his father's passion for hunting and weapons, and who found a perfect match in Angela.

"I like to say that Lex became interested in me when he learned that I'd been taught to use a shotgun at the age of 15," says Angela, with a grin.

After they were married in 1986, the couple embarked on a year-long, round-the-world honeymoon which took them to Northern British Columbia in Canada, where Lex had previously worked as a hunting guide a decade earlier.

With Lex as guide and Angela as cook, the couple would set out with pack horses as they took well-heeled hunters on hunting expeditions where the couple shot moose, bison and even bear.

"It was a great adventure and a great way to start off a marriage. It gave us lots of memories," Lex says.

Inside the museum is a mounted moose head, the forequarters of a bison and a taxidermied grizzly bear that Lex was forced to shoot when it charged him.

Immediately outside there is a Korean rocket launcher capable of firing 150 arrows at a time, which would have been aimed at Japan in the 1500s.

It points towards the 1753-built 6-pounder cannon constructed in the English foundry that built the cannons for Captain James Cook's voyage to New Zealand and Australia on board The Endeavour.

Next is a replica trebuchet from the Dark Ages around 800AD, and then the Genghis Khan triple crossbow.

Towering above them is the trebuchet that King Edward I would have used on the Scots in the early 1300s. It took Lex two months to build the replica in 2008, and even though its launching arm is 13m high, it is still only two-thirds the size of the original.

It's an eccentric, fascinating and impressive collection of hunting trophies and weaponry that both entertains and educates friends and invited guests of the Severinsens.

When asked to sum up the items and explain the collection, Lex says, simply: "They've all been wonderful excuses to have an adventure with the family."