A day of rural recreation and nostalgia at Fengate Farm in Norfolk as we bring in the golden harvest, featuring farming scenes from the 1940's & 50's.

We are delighted to offer another opportunity to recreate the agricultural scenes of decades past, when harvesting by hand was a way of life and ancient steam engines complemented more ‘modern’ tractors which themselves have now become period pieces. 

Our visits to Weeting are amongst our most successful and long-running events and never fail to produce fantastic and evocative images. It is the mixture of vintage machinery at work doing what it was designed to do decades ago, alongside farm workers whose dress closely mirrors that worn when the practices demonstrated during our events were both common and essential to the survival and wellbeing of the nation. We aim to have several steam engines in action including Burrell crane Lord Derby with living van. The harvest will be gathered in and bound together in the morning, loaded up traditional tools, then later in the day will be threshed using a traditional threshing drum.

In addition to the steam and other vintage vehicles, we will have our usual contingent of wonderful re-enactors, not only playing a part but actually working the land in a fashion that lay at the heart of the rural landscape for over a hundred years. Expect our shooting, picnic and other entertainment, providing a unique series of opportunities for photography and to capture potentially award-winning images. There are very, very few locations where such scenes can be so accurately and joyfully recreated, and we hope you will be able to join us to share the fun and heritage that together combine to make our visits to Weeting so memorable.

One of the finest locations to recreate the agricultural scenes of yesteryear is in the rural tranquility of the Weeting Estate near Brandon on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. Just a few miles from the historic town of Thetford where the famous works of Charles Burrell & Sons manufactured steam engines for use across the globe, an array of engines can on very special occasions still be seen at work performing the same duties in the same way they worked for over a century. We are very privileged to be given front row seats to watch and photograph through this window on the past, seeing scenes which turn back the clock to a time that is largely forgotten and certainly seldom seen today.

Our events allow you to capture the atmosphere of what for many were the golden years of agriculture, along with some of the other activities that were carried out with the help of steam traction. Today we will have several engines in steam covering a range of activities once common in the earlier years of the Twentieth Century. We will not only have the engines, but also use of living vans which used to be towed between work venues and used by crews for overnight stays and longer, plus other equipment associated with the steam era. Our crews and land girls all dress appropriately to complete the traditional scenes, providing ideal period cameos.