Author: Charlotte Ekins

How is your drainage?

There was a lot of time pressure in the last week of the internship as I tried to keep up with the project as it expanded. Originally I was going to catalogue the contents of 2 barns of agricultural equipment but ended up doing at least double that (Sacrewell has a seemingly endless supply of equipment). With the cataloguing done, I then had time to stay on and help decide what would happen to the 600+ objects I had spent hours nurturing and puzzling over. For the purpose of this task we adapted the game ‘snog, marry, avoid’ and created ‘sell, keep, scrap’.

How many buses does it take to fill a barn?

Now just under ¾ of the way through my internship at Sacrewell and I have catalogued about 3 times the number of objects I originally aimed for.

The project is progressing rapidly and I am really enjoying working at such a fast pace. Every time I finish cataloguing the machinery in one barn then I feel a sense of achievement, but am a bit lost. I end up scraping the bottom of the barrel searching for useful tasks to do (pun intended, we have a lot of barrels). Just when I am getting bored of double checking manufacturer’s names or re-taking photographs in better lighting… then someone tells me there is a hidden pile of objects over there!

Name that tractor!?

Week 1 completed, that’s 25% of my internship. Sacrewell farm is now ~0.5% closer to the public unveiling of their collection.

The William Scott Abott Trust is an agricultural education charity with a visitor’s centre near Peterborough. This idyllic site, with its 18th century water mill, charismatic staff and farmyard animals, is my office for 4 weeks. What a hardship for me to bare! Leisurely walking round the 550 acre organic fields and visiting the alpaca on my lunch break.

When I’m not enjoying the beautiful setting I am focused on cataloguing their collection of farm equipment. Ranging from a 7m long hay baler machine to a 20cm spanner.