Edwardian Farm (2010) s01e12 Episode Script
Episode 12
1 Here in Devon, in the tranquil Tamar Valley, is a port that once bustled with industry.
Overground, farmers supplied Britain's growing towns and cities with fresh produce.
Daffodils set for London.
While underground, miners extracted copper and precious minerals.
Firing! Now, at Morwellham Quay, archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, and historian Ruth Goodman, have gone back to the early 20th Century to live the lives of Edwardian farmers for a full calendar year.
Oh, look at them! Look at them all there! They're so sweet! They've not just been farming, but getting to grips with the rural industries that once brought wealth to Devon.
- Oh! - Oh, wow! We got something! Last month, the farmers successfully harvested cherries That one doesn't have a stalk.
and potatoes - We've got to pick up every single potato.
then enjoyed a trip to the seaside.
We are the Pierrotters.
Huzzah! Now it's August and their time on the Edwardian Farm is drawing to a close.
To harvest the oats, rain permitting.
In their quest to forecast the weather, they must master old crafts that were disappearing from the Edwardian countryside.
While looking forward to the new inventions, the new discoveries, and changes in society that began in Edwardian Britain and shaped the world we know today.
We are now in the 20th Century! Back in February, Alex and Peter sowed an oat crop.
In the Edwardian era, this would have been sold as horse feed.
There were more horses in Edwardian Britain than at any time in history, so it was a lucrative crop to grow.
But judging exactly when to harvest them is critical.
Once again, they've called on local farmer Mr Mudge for advice.
What do you think of this oat crop? Err, it's a very good crop of oats, this.
- Yeah? - It's got a good, erm, ear on it.
Right.
Lot of grain.
Steady, Peter! Don't you knock it down, Peter.
Oh, no! That's got a good ear on it.
- Look, it's, erm - Yeah.
There's a lot of grain here.
It's the weather, really, that is going to play havoc with it, if you get some heavy downpours and the wind and that.
So it's actually so tall that there's a danger now of the plant, the weather blowing it down, flattening it, and then we can't harvest it.
When the wind's back southwest, you know it's going to rain, but when it's up round the north, the northeast, you know you're in for a dry spell, you know? Right, OK, so we need to look out for that change in direction.
- Yeah.
- Right.
And then we know we're going to get some dry weather, and that's our opportunity to harvest.
An Edwardian farmer's income relied on a successful harvest.
So forecasting a week without rain, to first cut, then dry the oats, was essential.
Observing wind direction was key.
A southwesterly could bring rain, whereas a northeasterly would indicate dry.
So they need a weathervane.
They're commissioning one made using crafts that were dying out due to mass production.
So this is the sort of highest apex of the farm, isn't it? I think it is, and here's the man.
They've called on blacksmith Simon Summers.
- I'm well, thank you.
- Good to see you.
- What brings me up here, then? - Well, we've got a special job lined up for you.
Have you? And what's that? We would like to erect a weathervane up there.
- OK.
- And we think you're the man to make it.
- The highest spot, is it? - Yeah, pretty much.
It's also the most kind of obvious place in terms of visitors coming up to the farm and people being able to see it.
- I think that's quite important as well.
- OK.
Well, two options.
Maybe a shire horse ploughing, or maybe a cockerel? But I think, to be honest, a cockerel would look quite good up there, as people approach the farm, coming down from the lower track.
Yeah.
Alex wants to base the cockerel weathervane on his prize bird, Sunny.
It's that one with the last sickle feather.
First they must catch him.
Looking busy.
He's unaware.
Here he is.
He's here.
He's coming round, Peter.
Got him! Ah, now we have him! He's made his - Fatal.
fatal mistake here.
- Peter, I'm locking you in.
- OK.
Careful, mate, that's my show bird.
- I've got him! - Brilliant.
Right, time to take your vital measurements, Sunny.
One foot and 10 inches.
Foot and an inch when he's got his neck fully extended.
OK, so we're going to go from here, that centre point again, out to the edge of his sickles.
I'd say a foot and four inches maybe.
OK, I've got what I need.
I'll just go away and do some drawings.
- Full-size drawings.
- Excellent.
- Yeah, we look forward to seeing them.
- Yeah, brilliant.
The market gardening enterprises have been a great success.
They've reaped bountiful harvests of daffodils, cherries and strawberries.
Before they leave, Ruth wants to ensure next year's strawberry harvest will be just as fruitful.
Market gardening takes such a lot out of the soil, you have to put something back.
Otherwise you get a smaller and smaller crop every year, so now's the time to do that.
There's such a lot of pressure on your farmyard manure.
You know, there's only so much of it, and you've got so much to fertilise, that you can't rely just on that.
Likewise, many of the chemical fertilisers are expensive and not always as good for market gardening as they are for arable crops.
In these coastal areas, Edwardian market gardeners used seaweed as fertiliser.
Seaweed is full of all those sort of minerals that the earth needs to be replenished with.
And here it's so easy to get.
There's the sea, not very far away.
And the barges to bring it, easily and cheaply, in bulk, up the river.
Peter's come to the blacksmith's forge to meet Simon, where he's sketched a design for the weathervane.
- Hi, Simon.
- Hello.
So you've got this effigy of Sunny and you've got him leaning into the wind.
And then these massive tail feathers, and that's just going to help him swing and tell us which way the wind's coming from.
- Yeah, and he's actually lurching forward.
- Yeah.
You know, like crowing.
- And this is your repoussé, is it? - That's right, yeah.
That's a repoussé mask of the Green Man.
Repoussé means beating a sheet of metal repeatedly from one side, then the other, to create intricate embossed figures.
Simon's going to use this technique to make the weathervane.
He's one of the few who still practise the craft.
That's all of the artwork done now.
First he transfers the artwork to a copper sheet.
I'm just going to bellow this in.
So we've got a little dip in there.
- And if you - What is this? - This is, er, it's leather, filled with silver sand.
- Right.
- So it's got some give in it.
- Yeah.
So if we bring that onto there.
Next, Simon shapes the copper to form the body of the cockerel.
There we are, we've got the body in that little dip that I formed with the mallet.
If we have a look, you can start to see it swelling out.
- So now we need to come down to this area.
- Right.
Beating copper gradually makes it hard and brittle.
So every so often Simon must soften it again, using a technique called annealing.
The fire's nice and hot now, so we can put it on the fire, right in the heart of the fire.
Yeah? And we've got to keep moving it along to get a uniform heat.
- Right.
And this is going to make it softer, is it? - Yeah.
Heating then quickly cooling the metal makes it malleable again, ready for more shaping.
Yeah, now, that's it.
OK, I've got it.
Ruth's travelled downriver to the coast, in search of seaweed.
She's meeting expert forager Robin Harford.
- Hi, Robin! - Hi, Ruth.
I've come to gather some seaweed for my market garden.
- Oh, have you? - I have indeed.
- What sort of stuff do I need? - Well, driftweed, which is what we've got here.
Right.
It's been brought up by the tides, it's been quite stormy recently, so a fair amount's here.
And any seaweed.
- Any? - Yeah, any seaweed.
- Absolutely anything that the sea chucks up? - Yeah.
Seaweed is rich in nitrogen and potassium, essential elements for plant growth.
The farmers We gather it, we take it up to them, spread it on the land, and then all he has to do is plough it in.
Simple as that.
No processing.
No organisation.
Straight off the beach, straight on the land.
It's quite environmentally friendly, isn't it? Because it's not like you're killing anything to harvest it.
No, and you're using driftweed, which is the dead washed-up seaweed that's come in.
How many people were doing it in the Edwardian period? Was it sort of a big thing? Or - Coastal communities were huge.
- Yeah.
Well, you know, people were still on the land.
They hadn't all moved into the cities and towns for work.
So it was a community venture.
Poor people, you know, need some money, need the work.
Ooh, there's an enormous patch over there.
- I'll go and get started.
I'll see you later.
- OK.
Goodbye.
Ruth's collected 10 sacks of seaweed.
Now she must transport them back to the farm.
In the Edwardian era, this would have been done by boat.
Thousands of tons of seaweed were transported in this way, to market gardens on the banks of the River Tamar.
Now she can fertilise the harvested strawberry plants to ensure a healthy crop next year.
In this form it also makes a really great weed seed-free mulch.
And, of course, it's cheap.
So the seaweed should fertilise the soil, reintroduce all those nutrients that the year's cropping took out of it.
And keep down the weeds over the winter.
It'll slowly rot down, releasing its goodness, choking the weeds out of life.
- So this is annealed and ready to work again? - That's right, yeah.
In the forge, the copper cockerel is taking shape.
Next, Simon beats it on the outside to form the feathers.
To give him something to hammer against, he's filling the cockerel with hot pitch.
As we add the pitch to it now, it's going to slowly melt in there and then fill that dip in, and all of these bits that we've hammered out, we want to fill with pitch.
Once the pitch has cooled, the copper sheet is flipped over.
This way a little bit.
That's it.
And then off we go.
Let it go, yeah.
And there it goes.
Now the pitch is supporting the copper, Simon gets on with the fine repoussé work.
- Can you see it go down? - It moves a lot, doesn't it? That's right, and we've got the pitch behind to support this.
Crafts like this were often passed down from father to son and took years to master.
- Do you want to take that one? - OK.
- Work on that area.
- Yeah.
And I'm going to work over here with a similar sort of tool.
But by the early 20th Century, they were living on borrowed time.
In the Edwardian period, crafts were starting to die back, cos you're getting mass production.
When the war came about, the First World War, we lost so many craftsmen.
And youngsters that would have taken on those skills - Yeah.
- Erm, from their fathers.
I suppose it was the war that wiped out a generation of young men, wasn't it? Yeah.
It had a serious effect on craftsmen in our country.
The pitch is removed so Simon can work from the inside again.
By repeatedly working from one side, then the other, he's able to bring the feathers of the cockerel into sharp relief.
- Shall we have a look at that? - Yeah.
There you go, look, you can see it coming up there.
- And we've got to taper it into there.
- Right.
But you can see it coming out, and we can push that down.
Wind direction is not the only way Edwardian farmers forecast weather.
A barometer, measuring atmospheric pressure, is also a useful indicator.
During the Edwardian age, barometers were becoming cheaper and more widely available, - thanks to mass production.
- Hello, Philip.
Alex has come to meet Philip Collins to get one for the farm.
- This is a fantastic selection you've got here.
- All different types.
When we talk about a rise and fall in air pressure, does that literally equate to good and bad weather? As a generalisation, yes.
Normal increase in pressure over a few days will give you better weather.
If it decreases, it'll give you worsening weather, but it can be affected by wind, so sometimes it's a change of wind direction.
Right.
And this is enabling farmers, then, to start to read the weather in a way they probably wouldn't have been able to before the invention of this machine.
No Farmers, people out in the countryside, often, have an ability to tell the weather from history.
Their folklore and things handed down to them.
But the barometer is the first or the main scientific way of measuring air pressure.
So would farmers, then, back in the Edwardian period, have had one of these? I'm fairly sure than most tenant farmers would not have been able to afford a barometer such as this.
So someone with my size farm, really, I wouldn't be able to afford one of these.
You'd rely on a neighbour having one.
And if he was cutting his fields, you'd cut your fields.
Right.
But for your case, there's another thing we could suggest.
This is an old-fashioned, very tried and tested barometer.
I think it would just suit your pocket.
- This is bottom end of the market? - Low end of the market.
OK.
So you find a jam jar of some sort, a glass jar.
- Yeah.
- And a fairly long-necked bottle.
And some coloured water.
You can use plain water, but coloured makes it more noticeable.
It's more visual.
That goes in there.
So the air in this bottle now is sealed because it's got water round the opening.
OK.
If atmospheric pressure rises, it'll press down on the surface of the liquid in the jar, raising the level in the neck of the bottle.
This would tell the farmer that a spell of warm, dry weather was likely.
So you have a very simple, crude, domestic type of barometer.
That'll probably suit your pocket for the time being.
I think it will do.
And maybe if the harvest is successful, I could invest in one of these.
You can buy a nice one.
It's the second week of August and the oats are beginning to ripen.
But it's been raining all month.
If this continues, it could flatten the crop, making it impossible to harvest.
Here's the final drawing, then, Peter.
The weathervane's progressing well.
But the copper work forms only part of it.
The cockerel must be attached to a support so it can rotate freely in the wind.
This is what we've got to focus on now, so we need quite a bit of iron.
- Yeah.
- And some charcoal would be useful.
- Right.
- For forging the iron.
What will the charcoal do? It'll put some, like, carbon content into the iron.
- Yeah.
- Erm, and it also gets a really good heat.
Cos we're going to have these billets of iron we've got to forge right out into the section sides.
- So if we've got more heat in the fire - Yeah.
it'll be ideal.
- Perfect.
Simon wants to make iron for the weathervane in the traditional way.
To do this, he'll need large quantities of charcoal.
Making charcoal was a craft that was disappearing from the Edwardian countryside.
Just where that knot is.
So Ruth and Peter have come to get help from Colin Richards and Nick Crouper, experts in rural crafts.
- How do you do? - Hello, Peter.
- The directions must have been good! - Yes! - This is the site of the charcoal burner? - Yes, it's flat, easy to get the wood to it, and once we've cleared a space, taken away all this leaf mould, we can start building a clamp.
Colin's chosen a site well away from any trees.
Once the ground is cleared, they can build the charcoal fire, or clamp, starting with the chimney.
Right, we're running out of rope, Peter.
I do have my belt.
You can't burn that! Your trousers'll fall down! It's in a good cause, Ruth! The ultimate sacrifice.
Thank you very much.
You will not go unrewarded.
It's very good string is this! Next, the raw material for making charcoal, seasoned oak, is stacked tightly round the chimney.
This process of making charcoal what are we doing to the wood? Well, the wood is made up of cellulose and minerals that - you see the trees around you, they suck from the earth.
And those items are quite flammable.
They're volatile.
Right.
So in the process of making charcoal, what we do to start with is burn those off.
And then once we've burned them off, we try and stop the burning process.
That's when we starve the clamp of oxygen, leaving ourselves with pure carbon.
By driving off the cellulose and minerals, the logs will contain just carbon.
This is charcoal and will burn at a much higher temperature than wood.
This is a key moment, now, because we're going to cover it all up and set fire to it.
And then, apart from controlling the air, there's not much we can do.
Enclosing the wood in a soil and straw layer makes the flow of air into the fire easily controllable.
All we've got is two ton of soil, so we've got to be really careful with it.
All we need is a thin layer to cover the whole of the clamp.
There you go, second ingredient for your mud pie.
Oh, lovely! Not too much, just a slight dampening.
Now it's time to light it.
There we go, that's perfect.
A few embers.
What we're trying to do is get the fire going and then slow it down so that it's a cold fire.
And so you get a lot more chemicals in the wood actually occupying the smoke, and that's why it's important not to breathe it in.
So I suppose you need fuel, heat and oxygen to make a fire.
- Yeah.
- And we're reducing the oxygen.
- Yeah.
- Which reduces the heat, which preserves some of the fuel, - which will be charcoal in the end, I suppose.
- Yeah.
As the fire in here heats up, it's obviously everything's starting to shrink as it dries out.
The moisture's driven off.
So this outside layer of mud is cracking, and where the cracks appear, smoke starts coming out, and that's a bad thing, cos that means air can get in.
So we've just got to keep covering all these little smoke holes, so that we can control our fire.
We're now getting, sort of, heat into the clamp.
And what we're burning off there are the gases.
Colin's watching the clamp closely, looking for signs that the cellulose and minerals have burnt off.
Then he blocks off the chimney to restrict the air, slowing the burn.
We're bridging over the clamp now with these timbers, so that we can put a covering on, which will actually choke the fire.
The fire must smoulder for five days and nights, until the wood has completely carbonised into charcoal.
The team are here for the long haul, so it's time to set up a sturdy shelter.
- I think that's in now, Peter.
- Cool.
Can you hang off of it? I'll see if I can hang off it.
Ooh! Oh! I can't Quick! Can I get a bunk down? Sorry? We're going the other way now, Peter.
Right Right, well, it's certainly strong enough to take the canvas, I think.
Now we've got our ridge pole up, just putting a canvas over, and this is going to be our shelter for the next five days as we watch and tend the charcoal clamp.
This is how charcoal burners would have lived, moving from site to site through the woods.
And, you know, it was a permanent occupation, and there are many accounts of people raising, you know, sort of about eight kids in a shelter no bigger than this.
You don't often get a chance to build a camp at my age, so I always love getting out in the sticks properly and living under canvas.
As night falls, and they settle into life on the camp, it's time for some sustenance.
Devon pot cake.
It's cheap, it's filling and it's really easy to do on a fire.
Flour with some fat rubbed in, as if it was pastry.
And then I'll be adding some eggs and milk.
And then whatever fruit you can find.
And cook it in a pot.
This is a real cooking in the woods sort of a recipe, this is.
Tinkers and Gypsies and charcoal burners.
Next, trout, cooked on a shovel.
Look at that, instant sear! A piece of Devon pot cake? Ooh, thank you very much.
- Delicious.
Mm.
- I know it's got fruit in.
It's not really pudding.
Do you want fish with it? This is the clean shovel.
Not the dung shovel.
Wunderbar.
- There we go.
A bit of fish? - Thank you.
- Delicious.
- Could you ask for more? Look, we're very close to the end of the year.
How are we going to go out? Are we going to go out with a bang or a whimper? A whimper.
Look, you may cry yourself to sleep every night, Peter.
But some of us want to do something to mark the end of our year.
- What do you think we should do? - A fête? Yeah, a big fête.
All the latest equipment they would have had in the Edwardian period.
The future.
Yeah, the future Edwardian summer fêtes were usually held after the harvest, when farmers had money in their pockets.
Village fairs and agricultural shows weren't just about having fun.
They were also a place where salesmen could show off the very latest advances in farming technology.
At the forge, Simon's working day and night to get the copper cockerel finished.
So far, it's taken him 120 hours.
This is the most rewarding bit for me.
Finishing touches, the detail.
Yeah, it actually looks like Sunny now.
Back at the camp, Colin's preparing to make iron for the weathervane.
To do this he's building a primitive furnace.
In the Edwardian period, there was a great shortage of iron.
And in this area a number of skills survived into the modern age.
You had iron ore.
And if you wanted iron, you could actually make it in what is, essentially, a very primitive furnace.
Quite an ancient technology, but was this still going on in the Edwardian period? Well, in these rural areas, skills survived for generations beyond which they were almost obsolete or extinct in the cities.
Because what you didn't have, quite often, was money.
And if you had the raw materials, which they had down here, then you could always get yourself out of a fix.
Iron is found naturally in a rock called iron ore.
To extract the metal from the ore, it must be heated in the furnace to 1,200 degrees Celsius.
To achieve this, they must burn the charcoal.
This is the acid test.
Five days, four nights without sleep.
And, you know, we need to know whether we've got good charcoal.
Digging through the layer of straw and soil, the charcoal is revealed.
- The first couple of pieces.
- Right.
- It's what we've been looking for all that time.
- Wow! Oak that is burnt right through and is pure carbon.
- Wow! - Black gold.
- Black gold? - Yeah.
- Gently does it.
- Lid up.
Oh, whoa! - And that's the iron ore going in.
- Yeah.
- That's the raw material, yeah? - That's right, yeah.
What exactly is going on in there now? Well, we've got the iron ore, which is fusing together.
- But we need that last little boost - Right.
to get it up to temperature, to get it up, you know, a thousand, 1,200 degrees.
So that we've got a workable bloom of iron.
To make the charcoal burn even hotter, air is blown in the furnace using Edwardian bellows, a back-breaking job that falls to Peter.
Simon's come to the camp to supervise the iron making.
While the furnace gets up to temperature, he's got something to show them.
There's a lot of hours gone into it, and with Peter's help, this is what we've come up with.
Wow! - I made the tea.
- Oh, my word, look at that! That is amazing, Simon, how you've got that relief there.
God, it's so thick as well.
I mean, it's not like a thin sort of foil of metal.
That's really chunky.
I can see the wind catching this, and catching the feathers, and Yeah, the feathers are just going to be like sails of a boat.
- So he crows into the wind? - He crows into the wind.
Which will help us tell which way the wind's blowing and what weather's going to come for our harvest, so - That's right, yes.
- Excellent.
- Next I need the iron, guys, for the pivot.
- Yeah.
After the copper, the arms for the letters, for the North, South, East, West.
And then some lovely graceful scrolls to support those arms.
Inside the furnace the charcoal's been burning for ten hours, raising the temperature of the iron to melting point.
You can see, you know, the heat that's needed to get it to this stage.
- I can feel the heat coming out.
- And hear the roar.
- And you see our charcoal glowing? - Yes.
Now the molten iron must be extracted, using the most basic of methods.
- Simon, what are we doing? - Basically, one at a time, but gentle blows.
Peter leads.
In theory, the molten metal inside the ore should all stick together like toffee, while the waste material, known as slag, breaks away.
But it soon becomes clear there's something not quite right.
So.
Run us through what just happened there! It's just crumbling.
There's not enough pureness in there, is there? At the moment we'd be hard pushed to make a tie pin.
Yeah! Colin thinks the iron ore wasn't hot enough, so it's back in the furnace to get it even hotter.
Whoa! Ahh! What sort of pressure should I put on these tongs? Just keep them Now that is just a completely different material.
It's a lot spongier, isn't it? Kind of like, getting the good bits to stick together.
- And it's working, isn't it? Look, it's working.
- Yeah.
Essentially, we've taken a raw material from the hillside.
Having done this burn we've produced enough charcoal, then to reduce that raw material to a workable and malleable material in itself that we'll be able to use for this weathervane.
That's right, once we've actually got all of the waste product out of this, and then we can actually forge it into any shape that we need.
Now they've worked out the method they must produce enough for the weathervane.
Back at the forge Simon's worked the iron into rods.
Now he's using the charcoal to heat it, ready to make the support for the weathervane.
- And how's this charcoal doing? - It's really good.
We're getting the heat quick in there.
Obviously, we've had to break the charcoal down quite a bit.
- Yeah.
- Cost there's quite, you know, big chunks.
- I mean, is charcoal good for working metal? - Yeah, very good.
You don't need much air going into the fire.
Not so much as you do for coal or coke.
But you can get the heat in very quickly with charcoal.
Now we've just got to get on with the scroll now.
And we'll just start to curve it off the edge with the anvil.
And I'm brushing it with a hammer.
- Brushing it, so it's - Gently brushing it down.
- So it's really thin metal.
- And then, that's it.
Knocking it towards me.
And then just gently elevate.
Here's the start of the scroll.
In the field, the oats are ripe and ready to be harvested.
But the rain keeps coming, and if they're left too long, they'll rot.
The farmers need to predict a week without rain, so they can first cut, then dry the crop.
The cockerel, too, is turning golden, as Simon puts the finishing touches to his masterpiece.
I can see little flakes of gold moving as you touch them with the brush.
- I'm just going to do from his cheek to his beak.
- Right, just that area.
First he coats the copper with glue, then gently applies the gold leaf, using static electricity.
What you have to do is be very careful with the static, cos that's the most important thing, and I'm getting the static from my stubble on my face.
You're using body-made static as you're sort of, lifting - Magnet, yeah, - As a magnet, yeah.
And it's incredible, isn't it, because, I mean, this gold leaf still is beaten by hand, isn't it? That's right, yeah.
It's actually, approximately four millionths of a inch thick.
- Four millionth! - And it's going to protect the weathervane.
- This is making like a complete seal, isn't it? - Yeah.
It's like a membrane of gold around the whole item and it's going to catch the sun, and look proud to be there, and it's not going to corrode, you know? Finally the weathervane is ready to take pride of place at the farm.
- Hello! - Perfect time-keeping.
That's heavy, carrying that up the lane.
- All right? - You be careful.
I will.
- I don't think he was ever in the Boy Scouts.
- If he was, he didn't pay much attention.
Ye of little faith.
- Are you happy with that, Pete? - No, but it'll do.
OK.
I've got it.
This won't be the first cockup we've seen this year, Peter.
- It won't be the last! - Do you need a hand up there? - Yes, please, Alex.
- Nice soft Goodman mattress to land on if I slip.
You can trust my ladders, Peter.
You just need to lift it up here a little bit higher.
Yeah.
OK.
- Right, if you hold it there.
Just slide it on.
- Yeah.
Wow! Give it a spin.
Spin it round, there we are.
- There's a bit of a gust of wind there.
- Bit of a gust, whoa.
- Oh, yeah, it's going.
- There it is.
It's showing us the way the wind's blowing.
- Yeah! - Which is? In the direction of "Don't harvest your oats yet".
- That looks fantastic from down here.
- Fantastic.
- Job well done, Simon.
- Thank you.
A tribute to the craftsmen and women of Britain.
- Yeah.
Definitely.
Drink to that.
- Yeah.
Cheers.
August has been a washout, the worst possible weather for harvesting oats.
But now they've got all the tools they need to predict a dry spell.
Well, that's definitely going up.
So we should have some good weather on the way.
Alex is looking for a rise in pressure with his home-made barometer.
Peter's keeping an eye on the wind direction.
And Ruth's got her own method.
This is my granny's way of telling the weather.
A bit of seaweed hanging outside.
If you get a high humidity it goes all slimy.
For the past few days the atmospheric pressure's been high and the wind's been blowing from the northeast.
This should guarantee a period of dry weather, so the team have decided to harvest the oats this afternoon.
Rather than relying on horsepower, the team are turning to petrol power.
They'll be using a machine invented in the Edwardian age, that was to revolutionise farming: The tractor.
Engineer David White and farmer Harry Williams have brought along The Mogul.
How fast does it go then? It actually goes the speed of a walking horse, which is three miles an hour.
It just has one single speed forward.
It does have the benefit of a reverse gear for manoeuvring.
These were like the earliest attempts of mechanising farming, but within ten years a tractor would be recognisable as you see a modern tractor.
Right.
The tractor's pulling a reaper-binder, one of the most important agricultural machines of the age.
Mr Mudge used this one as a boy and it hasn't been used for half a century.
First it cuts the oats, then ties them into sheaves.
But after a promising start, it all goes a bit haywire.
Just setting this knotter, it's just causing us so many problems.
The knotter, the device that ties the oats into sheaves, has jammed.
This lot isn't tied at all.
Some of the others have got some string holding them in places, but this lot's just been chucked out.
We've finally worked out that where it comes out of the drum it's just pinching the string.
And that's just stopping it coming through, which means it snaps.
If we don't get this right, it's such a sensitive piece of kit, that's it.
Might as well do it by hand.
- Try it now.
- How's that? The harvest has attracted the attention of cinematographer Chris Davis and producer David Upshal.
The first purpose-built cinema in Britain was built in 1907.
By 1914, there were over 3,000.
So there were a lot of little film camera crews out and about in Edwardian Britain? More than you'd think.
The thing that's really happening in Britain is the kind of beginnings of a documentary market.
They've realised people are fascinated with seeing real events, being able to see the King, the Queen, the Prime Minister.
And also seeing themselves.
People are absolutely fascinated with seeing themselves.
You've got a handle on the side of this camera.
Do you have to wind it to make it work? It was the only means of turning the film round, yes.
And you had to do it at a steady pace.
And it should have been 15 frames a second.
But different cameramen would do it at different speeds.
And sometimes, if the projectionist did it at another different speed, it would change the look of the film altogether.
You could make them go faster or slower.
There was no electric motor until later on.
It was all done by hand.
After some adjustments the reaper-binder's back in action, cutting and binding the oats into sheaves.
But precious time's been lost.
Thing is, it's five past four.
It's taken us this long to get this far.
We waited for the weather, and really we've only got another four and a half hours of sunlight, if the weather doesn't, of course, turn.
And there we are.
The perfect sheaf of oats.
We've finally, we think we've got there.
We've done a couple of clean runs, we haven't got choked up, we're tying nicely, the sun has come out.
It's going down, but it's come out, so half the battle is won.
This is the cider the boys made, way back at the beginning.
I hope it's all right.
Oi! - I'll have a little one.
- So it's an interesting colour.
- Is it now? - Now this is proper scrumpy, proper Being as I'm driving, I'd better not have a big one! - You can ask us any day! - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's good stuff, that.
I love me cider.
I think that's a fine scrumpy, that is.
What about you, Mr Mudge? We'll have a barrel from them and take it home with us.
Well, we've got 300 pints! - Let's drink to a gathered harvest.
- Let's do that.
- Cheers.
- Cheers.
- Cheers.
- Slightly premature, but Looks good, though, doesn't it? The oats will be left in the field for a week to dry before being stored in the barn.
With the harvest done, now they can look forward to the village fête.
Alex, Ruth and Peter's time on the Edwardian Farm is drawing to a close.
So it's time to say goodbye to the livestock.
For me this is the end of the poultry year.
I've brought them the next generation, doubled the size of the flock, doubled egg production as well.
So it's been a success, and I'm so pleased with these fellas.
Brilliant.
They're also saying goodbye to the Edwardian way of life that they've experienced for the past year.
Come on! I've really felt this year, so much of an empathy for people involved in the day-to-day fight for life.
For all its romanticism, for all its looking back on the past, the day-to-day realities of Edwardian life in the countryside are hard.
Really hard.
It's the day of the summer fête.
When the Edwardian age ended with the First World War in 1914 it left a legacy of innovations, such as the aeroplane, that would go on to shape the 20th century.
Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen! Come and see the latest innovations of the modern age! Fêtes would exhibit new inventions, like the latest in mechanised farming equipment.
Roll up! They were also a place to have fun and spend money after the hard work of the harvest.
Once raucous and drunken affairs, by the Edwardian age pressure from landowners and the Church had turned them into respectable, well-ordered events.
Mr Mudge has guided them all year through their farming exploits.
Put those on there Alex has threshed some of their oats to remove the grain so Mr Mudge can examine them.
If you can blow them out of your hand it won't be a good sample, but you can't blow them out of your hand, I don't think.
It's a good sample of oats, like.
You've done very well, like, you know? - Steve? - Steve.
- Have you got a glass of cider for Mr Mudge? - Oh, I certainly have.
So, Francis, get you to test our cider, and that'll be the acid test as whether we're proper Southwest farmers, I think.
- There you go, sir.
- I'm leaving the cider to the men.
I think it's a big thank you, and cheers.
- You've done a very good job.
- Cheers.
Good job, like.
Good cider-makers and good farmers all the way round.
You've done a very good job.
By the end of the Edwardian age, reliable, petrol-powered machines were appearing on farms.
Engineers transported their latest models around agricultural shows to encourage farmers to invest.
Having experienced first-hand the advantage of harvesting by machine, Alex is demonstrating the very latest in farming motive power.
Please gather round to marvel at some of the innovations of the age.
You at the back, sir, come forward The Victorian age had introduced steam power.
Now the Edwardian age introduced petrol power.
First and foremost we have the agricultural motor.
A quarter of the size of a steam engine with twice the power.
It was the dawn of a new industrial age of farming that would flourish throughout the 20th century.
actually doing the work of four shire Engineer Fred Lister is demonstrating how quickly they could thresh oats to remove the grain from the crop.
We are now in the 20th century! We have moved on! Where we used to use a flail we now have a machine to do this for us.
You would require four or five men working all day to produce what that produces in about two hours.
Would you please step back? Because we have one of the newest and most innovative machines ever to enter into British agriculture.
Fred's father produced one of the most celebrated agricultural machines of the age: The Lister static engine.
This engine performs the work of at least five horses.
See how a small pint of this new fuel, petrol, can help us to innovate on the farm.
No bales of hay are needed to feed an army of horses.
Mr Lister, can you see a time when there will no longer be horses on the farm? Yes, I'm afraid I can.
The horse is going to be a thing of the past working on a farm.
You have seen the beginnings of a new mechanised age in agriculture.
The internal combustion engine has finally arrived at the British farm.
- Hip-hip! - Hooray! Thank you very much for coming.
The Edwardian age also saw profound changes in society.
Women of Devon, we are in a crisis.
Men are making laws for women in total ignorance of what women themselves actually want.
Suffragettes campaigned for women's votes at events across Britain.
- Women beat men for endurance every time.
- Yeah! Women of Devon But despite an increasingly militant campaign, it wouldn't be until 1928 that women finally got the same voting rights as men.
Help us to win a great victory, and then you will not have lived in vain.
There was an entertainment revolution too.
From the Deep South of America came a new dance that swept through Britain's music halls.
Choreographer Caroline Heinz is introducing it to the fête.
- This is great, this, what's it called? - It's called the Cakewalk.
Cakewalk.
It was a dance that was done on plantations in the South, in America.
It's really, sort of, seems a bit like a comedy dance.
- It has that element of parody about it.
- Well, it is.
In effect they were mimicking the mannerisms of their white masters.
So everything would be exaggerated, so just a simple brush down would become a big brush.
And a brush of the legs, everything would be going.
The thing about the Cakewalk and the original thing about the Cakewalk was, it was competing.
So it was one plantation against another plantation.
And the prize was a cake.
It quickly took off over here and became one of the most popular dance crazes in Edwardian Britain.
Even King Edward VII was rumoured to have had private Cakewalk lessons at the Palace.
It's the final day on the Edwardian Farm.
To store the harvested oats in the barn.
- Horses are so versatile, aren't they? - I know.
I mean, tractors in the field are great, aren't they, but once you're on rough ground like this, the horse has still got such a lot of uses.
Exactly, there's no faster way of getting your last load of oats in, just before it starts raining as well.
I know.
Look at it, ominous.
Mechanisation of the countryside, and the demise of village crafts, were hastened by one of the most devastating events of the 20th century.
It would bring the golden age of Edwardian Britain to a brutal end: The First World War.
It was harvest time in August 1914 when war was declared.
- Oh, hello, Alan.
- Hiya.
Historian Professor Alan Howkins has studied its impact on the countryside.
Cheese here, from the field.
Everybody thought it was going to be a short war.
- Over by Christmas.
- "Over by Christmas," yes, everybody said.
And so people didn't really think about that, but there was a call for volunteers.
And that call, we're told, was met massively.
Interestingly, in the country districts it was a bit different.
You're gathering your oats in August 1914.
Harvest was the absolutely essential part of the year.
To a farmer it was where he made his money.
For the farm worker, it was often taken by the piece.
So you earn probably twice as much a week in your harvest as you did at the rest of the year.
I mean, there must have been a sense of priorities here.
- Not everyone could run off to war here.
- No.
And plenty of farmers didn't want their men to go.
They couldn't just let them go, no matter how patriotic or wonderful it was.
So the rush to join up was not as obvious, particularly in country districts, as people say it was.
It wasn't only men that were called to war.
Horses were too.
Michael Morpurgo wrote the novel Warhorse, about the experience of a farm horse going to war.
Right at the beginning of the war, when the Army came to the villages all over the country, the farmers often sold them, because they were paying good money.
And the Army really needed horses, that's for sure.
But also they would sometimes sequester horses.
They would say, "We're having that horse anyway, whether you like it or not.
" It was a hard and cruel life for four years if they survived.
You need them to pull ambulances, you need them to pull guns, ammunition wagons.
Because I think they thought mechanised stuff was going to come, but It didn't come fast enough.
And besides which, it gets bogged down, doesn't it? I mean, there are really horrible pictures of both men and horses up to here in mud.
- Many men and horses drowned.
- Drowned in mud.
It's estimated half a million horses died in the Great War.
Very few came back.
They suffered exactly as the men suffered.
The awful thing was that even if they survived those terrible four years, right at the end of the war, when it was all over, they only brought 60,000 horses home.
Well, you can reckon that over a million went and 60,000 came home, the truth is many, many of them were sold off to butchers in northern France.
- Right.
- For horsemeat.
- For horsemeat.
- After all they'd done.
The Edwardian age would become known as a golden age, perhaps in the light of the horrors that followed it.
I don't believe the First World War left anybody untouched.
You know, people like my grandmother, who lost her husband and a brother-in-law, two brothers out of three killed.
To her the world before the war, when she talked in her old age, was a much, much better place.
And yes, you know, you could say, "Oh, it's golden ageism".
Well, in some ways it was, it is, but in some ways it was a golden age, because your husband was alive, your brother-in-law was alive.
You know, that personal impact, just can, to my mind, can never, ever be overestimated.
It's an absolutely fundamental fact.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Bye-bye! - Bye.
Bye, chaps.
It's all history.
It's over for the horse.
It's a big shame.
- The countryside's going to be a noisy place.
- Mmm.
- Come on, then.
- Oh, well.
Onwards and upwards.
After a year at Morwellham Quay, it's time to leave Edwardian Britain for good.
I suppose, really, it's become understandable for me that in light of what happened in the Great War, that people did look back on that period, with maybe rose-tinted spectacles, and did think about when sons and fathers were around, and happy days spent in, sort of endless summers.
I know I am never going to read anything about the Edwardian era in the same light again.
It will always come now with this great sort of freight of emotion, and experience.
The farm itself is just a series of buildings and land.
I mean, that's one thing.
But the people who've taken us into their homes and taught us their skills And it's those relationships we've formed that are going to be the hardest things to leave behind.
We're removing ourselves from this community.
Overground, farmers supplied Britain's growing towns and cities with fresh produce.
Daffodils set for London.
While underground, miners extracted copper and precious minerals.
Firing! Now, at Morwellham Quay, archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, and historian Ruth Goodman, have gone back to the early 20th Century to live the lives of Edwardian farmers for a full calendar year.
Oh, look at them! Look at them all there! They're so sweet! They've not just been farming, but getting to grips with the rural industries that once brought wealth to Devon.
- Oh! - Oh, wow! We got something! Last month, the farmers successfully harvested cherries That one doesn't have a stalk.
and potatoes - We've got to pick up every single potato.
then enjoyed a trip to the seaside.
We are the Pierrotters.
Huzzah! Now it's August and their time on the Edwardian Farm is drawing to a close.
To harvest the oats, rain permitting.
In their quest to forecast the weather, they must master old crafts that were disappearing from the Edwardian countryside.
While looking forward to the new inventions, the new discoveries, and changes in society that began in Edwardian Britain and shaped the world we know today.
We are now in the 20th Century! Back in February, Alex and Peter sowed an oat crop.
In the Edwardian era, this would have been sold as horse feed.
There were more horses in Edwardian Britain than at any time in history, so it was a lucrative crop to grow.
But judging exactly when to harvest them is critical.
Once again, they've called on local farmer Mr Mudge for advice.
What do you think of this oat crop? Err, it's a very good crop of oats, this.
- Yeah? - It's got a good, erm, ear on it.
Right.
Lot of grain.
Steady, Peter! Don't you knock it down, Peter.
Oh, no! That's got a good ear on it.
- Look, it's, erm - Yeah.
There's a lot of grain here.
It's the weather, really, that is going to play havoc with it, if you get some heavy downpours and the wind and that.
So it's actually so tall that there's a danger now of the plant, the weather blowing it down, flattening it, and then we can't harvest it.
When the wind's back southwest, you know it's going to rain, but when it's up round the north, the northeast, you know you're in for a dry spell, you know? Right, OK, so we need to look out for that change in direction.
- Yeah.
- Right.
And then we know we're going to get some dry weather, and that's our opportunity to harvest.
An Edwardian farmer's income relied on a successful harvest.
So forecasting a week without rain, to first cut, then dry the oats, was essential.
Observing wind direction was key.
A southwesterly could bring rain, whereas a northeasterly would indicate dry.
So they need a weathervane.
They're commissioning one made using crafts that were dying out due to mass production.
So this is the sort of highest apex of the farm, isn't it? I think it is, and here's the man.
They've called on blacksmith Simon Summers.
- I'm well, thank you.
- Good to see you.
- What brings me up here, then? - Well, we've got a special job lined up for you.
Have you? And what's that? We would like to erect a weathervane up there.
- OK.
- And we think you're the man to make it.
- The highest spot, is it? - Yeah, pretty much.
It's also the most kind of obvious place in terms of visitors coming up to the farm and people being able to see it.
- I think that's quite important as well.
- OK.
Well, two options.
Maybe a shire horse ploughing, or maybe a cockerel? But I think, to be honest, a cockerel would look quite good up there, as people approach the farm, coming down from the lower track.
Yeah.
Alex wants to base the cockerel weathervane on his prize bird, Sunny.
It's that one with the last sickle feather.
First they must catch him.
Looking busy.
He's unaware.
Here he is.
He's here.
He's coming round, Peter.
Got him! Ah, now we have him! He's made his - Fatal.
fatal mistake here.
- Peter, I'm locking you in.
- OK.
Careful, mate, that's my show bird.
- I've got him! - Brilliant.
Right, time to take your vital measurements, Sunny.
One foot and 10 inches.
Foot and an inch when he's got his neck fully extended.
OK, so we're going to go from here, that centre point again, out to the edge of his sickles.
I'd say a foot and four inches maybe.
OK, I've got what I need.
I'll just go away and do some drawings.
- Full-size drawings.
- Excellent.
- Yeah, we look forward to seeing them.
- Yeah, brilliant.
The market gardening enterprises have been a great success.
They've reaped bountiful harvests of daffodils, cherries and strawberries.
Before they leave, Ruth wants to ensure next year's strawberry harvest will be just as fruitful.
Market gardening takes such a lot out of the soil, you have to put something back.
Otherwise you get a smaller and smaller crop every year, so now's the time to do that.
There's such a lot of pressure on your farmyard manure.
You know, there's only so much of it, and you've got so much to fertilise, that you can't rely just on that.
Likewise, many of the chemical fertilisers are expensive and not always as good for market gardening as they are for arable crops.
In these coastal areas, Edwardian market gardeners used seaweed as fertiliser.
Seaweed is full of all those sort of minerals that the earth needs to be replenished with.
And here it's so easy to get.
There's the sea, not very far away.
And the barges to bring it, easily and cheaply, in bulk, up the river.
Peter's come to the blacksmith's forge to meet Simon, where he's sketched a design for the weathervane.
- Hi, Simon.
- Hello.
So you've got this effigy of Sunny and you've got him leaning into the wind.
And then these massive tail feathers, and that's just going to help him swing and tell us which way the wind's coming from.
- Yeah, and he's actually lurching forward.
- Yeah.
You know, like crowing.
- And this is your repoussé, is it? - That's right, yeah.
That's a repoussé mask of the Green Man.
Repoussé means beating a sheet of metal repeatedly from one side, then the other, to create intricate embossed figures.
Simon's going to use this technique to make the weathervane.
He's one of the few who still practise the craft.
That's all of the artwork done now.
First he transfers the artwork to a copper sheet.
I'm just going to bellow this in.
So we've got a little dip in there.
- And if you - What is this? - This is, er, it's leather, filled with silver sand.
- Right.
- So it's got some give in it.
- Yeah.
So if we bring that onto there.
Next, Simon shapes the copper to form the body of the cockerel.
There we are, we've got the body in that little dip that I formed with the mallet.
If we have a look, you can start to see it swelling out.
- So now we need to come down to this area.
- Right.
Beating copper gradually makes it hard and brittle.
So every so often Simon must soften it again, using a technique called annealing.
The fire's nice and hot now, so we can put it on the fire, right in the heart of the fire.
Yeah? And we've got to keep moving it along to get a uniform heat.
- Right.
And this is going to make it softer, is it? - Yeah.
Heating then quickly cooling the metal makes it malleable again, ready for more shaping.
Yeah, now, that's it.
OK, I've got it.
Ruth's travelled downriver to the coast, in search of seaweed.
She's meeting expert forager Robin Harford.
- Hi, Robin! - Hi, Ruth.
I've come to gather some seaweed for my market garden.
- Oh, have you? - I have indeed.
- What sort of stuff do I need? - Well, driftweed, which is what we've got here.
Right.
It's been brought up by the tides, it's been quite stormy recently, so a fair amount's here.
And any seaweed.
- Any? - Yeah, any seaweed.
- Absolutely anything that the sea chucks up? - Yeah.
Seaweed is rich in nitrogen and potassium, essential elements for plant growth.
The farmers We gather it, we take it up to them, spread it on the land, and then all he has to do is plough it in.
Simple as that.
No processing.
No organisation.
Straight off the beach, straight on the land.
It's quite environmentally friendly, isn't it? Because it's not like you're killing anything to harvest it.
No, and you're using driftweed, which is the dead washed-up seaweed that's come in.
How many people were doing it in the Edwardian period? Was it sort of a big thing? Or - Coastal communities were huge.
- Yeah.
Well, you know, people were still on the land.
They hadn't all moved into the cities and towns for work.
So it was a community venture.
Poor people, you know, need some money, need the work.
Ooh, there's an enormous patch over there.
- I'll go and get started.
I'll see you later.
- OK.
Goodbye.
Ruth's collected 10 sacks of seaweed.
Now she must transport them back to the farm.
In the Edwardian era, this would have been done by boat.
Thousands of tons of seaweed were transported in this way, to market gardens on the banks of the River Tamar.
Now she can fertilise the harvested strawberry plants to ensure a healthy crop next year.
In this form it also makes a really great weed seed-free mulch.
And, of course, it's cheap.
So the seaweed should fertilise the soil, reintroduce all those nutrients that the year's cropping took out of it.
And keep down the weeds over the winter.
It'll slowly rot down, releasing its goodness, choking the weeds out of life.
- So this is annealed and ready to work again? - That's right, yeah.
In the forge, the copper cockerel is taking shape.
Next, Simon beats it on the outside to form the feathers.
To give him something to hammer against, he's filling the cockerel with hot pitch.
As we add the pitch to it now, it's going to slowly melt in there and then fill that dip in, and all of these bits that we've hammered out, we want to fill with pitch.
Once the pitch has cooled, the copper sheet is flipped over.
This way a little bit.
That's it.
And then off we go.
Let it go, yeah.
And there it goes.
Now the pitch is supporting the copper, Simon gets on with the fine repoussé work.
- Can you see it go down? - It moves a lot, doesn't it? That's right, and we've got the pitch behind to support this.
Crafts like this were often passed down from father to son and took years to master.
- Do you want to take that one? - OK.
- Work on that area.
- Yeah.
And I'm going to work over here with a similar sort of tool.
But by the early 20th Century, they were living on borrowed time.
In the Edwardian period, crafts were starting to die back, cos you're getting mass production.
When the war came about, the First World War, we lost so many craftsmen.
And youngsters that would have taken on those skills - Yeah.
- Erm, from their fathers.
I suppose it was the war that wiped out a generation of young men, wasn't it? Yeah.
It had a serious effect on craftsmen in our country.
The pitch is removed so Simon can work from the inside again.
By repeatedly working from one side, then the other, he's able to bring the feathers of the cockerel into sharp relief.
- Shall we have a look at that? - Yeah.
There you go, look, you can see it coming up there.
- And we've got to taper it into there.
- Right.
But you can see it coming out, and we can push that down.
Wind direction is not the only way Edwardian farmers forecast weather.
A barometer, measuring atmospheric pressure, is also a useful indicator.
During the Edwardian age, barometers were becoming cheaper and more widely available, - thanks to mass production.
- Hello, Philip.
Alex has come to meet Philip Collins to get one for the farm.
- This is a fantastic selection you've got here.
- All different types.
When we talk about a rise and fall in air pressure, does that literally equate to good and bad weather? As a generalisation, yes.
Normal increase in pressure over a few days will give you better weather.
If it decreases, it'll give you worsening weather, but it can be affected by wind, so sometimes it's a change of wind direction.
Right.
And this is enabling farmers, then, to start to read the weather in a way they probably wouldn't have been able to before the invention of this machine.
No Farmers, people out in the countryside, often, have an ability to tell the weather from history.
Their folklore and things handed down to them.
But the barometer is the first or the main scientific way of measuring air pressure.
So would farmers, then, back in the Edwardian period, have had one of these? I'm fairly sure than most tenant farmers would not have been able to afford a barometer such as this.
So someone with my size farm, really, I wouldn't be able to afford one of these.
You'd rely on a neighbour having one.
And if he was cutting his fields, you'd cut your fields.
Right.
But for your case, there's another thing we could suggest.
This is an old-fashioned, very tried and tested barometer.
I think it would just suit your pocket.
- This is bottom end of the market? - Low end of the market.
OK.
So you find a jam jar of some sort, a glass jar.
- Yeah.
- And a fairly long-necked bottle.
And some coloured water.
You can use plain water, but coloured makes it more noticeable.
It's more visual.
That goes in there.
So the air in this bottle now is sealed because it's got water round the opening.
OK.
If atmospheric pressure rises, it'll press down on the surface of the liquid in the jar, raising the level in the neck of the bottle.
This would tell the farmer that a spell of warm, dry weather was likely.
So you have a very simple, crude, domestic type of barometer.
That'll probably suit your pocket for the time being.
I think it will do.
And maybe if the harvest is successful, I could invest in one of these.
You can buy a nice one.
It's the second week of August and the oats are beginning to ripen.
But it's been raining all month.
If this continues, it could flatten the crop, making it impossible to harvest.
Here's the final drawing, then, Peter.
The weathervane's progressing well.
But the copper work forms only part of it.
The cockerel must be attached to a support so it can rotate freely in the wind.
This is what we've got to focus on now, so we need quite a bit of iron.
- Yeah.
- And some charcoal would be useful.
- Right.
- For forging the iron.
What will the charcoal do? It'll put some, like, carbon content into the iron.
- Yeah.
- Erm, and it also gets a really good heat.
Cos we're going to have these billets of iron we've got to forge right out into the section sides.
- So if we've got more heat in the fire - Yeah.
it'll be ideal.
- Perfect.
Simon wants to make iron for the weathervane in the traditional way.
To do this, he'll need large quantities of charcoal.
Making charcoal was a craft that was disappearing from the Edwardian countryside.
Just where that knot is.
So Ruth and Peter have come to get help from Colin Richards and Nick Crouper, experts in rural crafts.
- How do you do? - Hello, Peter.
- The directions must have been good! - Yes! - This is the site of the charcoal burner? - Yes, it's flat, easy to get the wood to it, and once we've cleared a space, taken away all this leaf mould, we can start building a clamp.
Colin's chosen a site well away from any trees.
Once the ground is cleared, they can build the charcoal fire, or clamp, starting with the chimney.
Right, we're running out of rope, Peter.
I do have my belt.
You can't burn that! Your trousers'll fall down! It's in a good cause, Ruth! The ultimate sacrifice.
Thank you very much.
You will not go unrewarded.
It's very good string is this! Next, the raw material for making charcoal, seasoned oak, is stacked tightly round the chimney.
This process of making charcoal what are we doing to the wood? Well, the wood is made up of cellulose and minerals that - you see the trees around you, they suck from the earth.
And those items are quite flammable.
They're volatile.
Right.
So in the process of making charcoal, what we do to start with is burn those off.
And then once we've burned them off, we try and stop the burning process.
That's when we starve the clamp of oxygen, leaving ourselves with pure carbon.
By driving off the cellulose and minerals, the logs will contain just carbon.
This is charcoal and will burn at a much higher temperature than wood.
This is a key moment, now, because we're going to cover it all up and set fire to it.
And then, apart from controlling the air, there's not much we can do.
Enclosing the wood in a soil and straw layer makes the flow of air into the fire easily controllable.
All we've got is two ton of soil, so we've got to be really careful with it.
All we need is a thin layer to cover the whole of the clamp.
There you go, second ingredient for your mud pie.
Oh, lovely! Not too much, just a slight dampening.
Now it's time to light it.
There we go, that's perfect.
A few embers.
What we're trying to do is get the fire going and then slow it down so that it's a cold fire.
And so you get a lot more chemicals in the wood actually occupying the smoke, and that's why it's important not to breathe it in.
So I suppose you need fuel, heat and oxygen to make a fire.
- Yeah.
- And we're reducing the oxygen.
- Yeah.
- Which reduces the heat, which preserves some of the fuel, - which will be charcoal in the end, I suppose.
- Yeah.
As the fire in here heats up, it's obviously everything's starting to shrink as it dries out.
The moisture's driven off.
So this outside layer of mud is cracking, and where the cracks appear, smoke starts coming out, and that's a bad thing, cos that means air can get in.
So we've just got to keep covering all these little smoke holes, so that we can control our fire.
We're now getting, sort of, heat into the clamp.
And what we're burning off there are the gases.
Colin's watching the clamp closely, looking for signs that the cellulose and minerals have burnt off.
Then he blocks off the chimney to restrict the air, slowing the burn.
We're bridging over the clamp now with these timbers, so that we can put a covering on, which will actually choke the fire.
The fire must smoulder for five days and nights, until the wood has completely carbonised into charcoal.
The team are here for the long haul, so it's time to set up a sturdy shelter.
- I think that's in now, Peter.
- Cool.
Can you hang off of it? I'll see if I can hang off it.
Ooh! Oh! I can't Quick! Can I get a bunk down? Sorry? We're going the other way now, Peter.
Right Right, well, it's certainly strong enough to take the canvas, I think.
Now we've got our ridge pole up, just putting a canvas over, and this is going to be our shelter for the next five days as we watch and tend the charcoal clamp.
This is how charcoal burners would have lived, moving from site to site through the woods.
And, you know, it was a permanent occupation, and there are many accounts of people raising, you know, sort of about eight kids in a shelter no bigger than this.
You don't often get a chance to build a camp at my age, so I always love getting out in the sticks properly and living under canvas.
As night falls, and they settle into life on the camp, it's time for some sustenance.
Devon pot cake.
It's cheap, it's filling and it's really easy to do on a fire.
Flour with some fat rubbed in, as if it was pastry.
And then I'll be adding some eggs and milk.
And then whatever fruit you can find.
And cook it in a pot.
This is a real cooking in the woods sort of a recipe, this is.
Tinkers and Gypsies and charcoal burners.
Next, trout, cooked on a shovel.
Look at that, instant sear! A piece of Devon pot cake? Ooh, thank you very much.
- Delicious.
Mm.
- I know it's got fruit in.
It's not really pudding.
Do you want fish with it? This is the clean shovel.
Not the dung shovel.
Wunderbar.
- There we go.
A bit of fish? - Thank you.
- Delicious.
- Could you ask for more? Look, we're very close to the end of the year.
How are we going to go out? Are we going to go out with a bang or a whimper? A whimper.
Look, you may cry yourself to sleep every night, Peter.
But some of us want to do something to mark the end of our year.
- What do you think we should do? - A fête? Yeah, a big fête.
All the latest equipment they would have had in the Edwardian period.
The future.
Yeah, the future Edwardian summer fêtes were usually held after the harvest, when farmers had money in their pockets.
Village fairs and agricultural shows weren't just about having fun.
They were also a place where salesmen could show off the very latest advances in farming technology.
At the forge, Simon's working day and night to get the copper cockerel finished.
So far, it's taken him 120 hours.
This is the most rewarding bit for me.
Finishing touches, the detail.
Yeah, it actually looks like Sunny now.
Back at the camp, Colin's preparing to make iron for the weathervane.
To do this he's building a primitive furnace.
In the Edwardian period, there was a great shortage of iron.
And in this area a number of skills survived into the modern age.
You had iron ore.
And if you wanted iron, you could actually make it in what is, essentially, a very primitive furnace.
Quite an ancient technology, but was this still going on in the Edwardian period? Well, in these rural areas, skills survived for generations beyond which they were almost obsolete or extinct in the cities.
Because what you didn't have, quite often, was money.
And if you had the raw materials, which they had down here, then you could always get yourself out of a fix.
Iron is found naturally in a rock called iron ore.
To extract the metal from the ore, it must be heated in the furnace to 1,200 degrees Celsius.
To achieve this, they must burn the charcoal.
This is the acid test.
Five days, four nights without sleep.
And, you know, we need to know whether we've got good charcoal.
Digging through the layer of straw and soil, the charcoal is revealed.
- The first couple of pieces.
- Right.
- It's what we've been looking for all that time.
- Wow! Oak that is burnt right through and is pure carbon.
- Wow! - Black gold.
- Black gold? - Yeah.
- Gently does it.
- Lid up.
Oh, whoa! - And that's the iron ore going in.
- Yeah.
- That's the raw material, yeah? - That's right, yeah.
What exactly is going on in there now? Well, we've got the iron ore, which is fusing together.
- But we need that last little boost - Right.
to get it up to temperature, to get it up, you know, a thousand, 1,200 degrees.
So that we've got a workable bloom of iron.
To make the charcoal burn even hotter, air is blown in the furnace using Edwardian bellows, a back-breaking job that falls to Peter.
Simon's come to the camp to supervise the iron making.
While the furnace gets up to temperature, he's got something to show them.
There's a lot of hours gone into it, and with Peter's help, this is what we've come up with.
Wow! - I made the tea.
- Oh, my word, look at that! That is amazing, Simon, how you've got that relief there.
God, it's so thick as well.
I mean, it's not like a thin sort of foil of metal.
That's really chunky.
I can see the wind catching this, and catching the feathers, and Yeah, the feathers are just going to be like sails of a boat.
- So he crows into the wind? - He crows into the wind.
Which will help us tell which way the wind's blowing and what weather's going to come for our harvest, so - That's right, yes.
- Excellent.
- Next I need the iron, guys, for the pivot.
- Yeah.
After the copper, the arms for the letters, for the North, South, East, West.
And then some lovely graceful scrolls to support those arms.
Inside the furnace the charcoal's been burning for ten hours, raising the temperature of the iron to melting point.
You can see, you know, the heat that's needed to get it to this stage.
- I can feel the heat coming out.
- And hear the roar.
- And you see our charcoal glowing? - Yes.
Now the molten iron must be extracted, using the most basic of methods.
- Simon, what are we doing? - Basically, one at a time, but gentle blows.
Peter leads.
In theory, the molten metal inside the ore should all stick together like toffee, while the waste material, known as slag, breaks away.
But it soon becomes clear there's something not quite right.
So.
Run us through what just happened there! It's just crumbling.
There's not enough pureness in there, is there? At the moment we'd be hard pushed to make a tie pin.
Yeah! Colin thinks the iron ore wasn't hot enough, so it's back in the furnace to get it even hotter.
Whoa! Ahh! What sort of pressure should I put on these tongs? Just keep them Now that is just a completely different material.
It's a lot spongier, isn't it? Kind of like, getting the good bits to stick together.
- And it's working, isn't it? Look, it's working.
- Yeah.
Essentially, we've taken a raw material from the hillside.
Having done this burn we've produced enough charcoal, then to reduce that raw material to a workable and malleable material in itself that we'll be able to use for this weathervane.
That's right, once we've actually got all of the waste product out of this, and then we can actually forge it into any shape that we need.
Now they've worked out the method they must produce enough for the weathervane.
Back at the forge Simon's worked the iron into rods.
Now he's using the charcoal to heat it, ready to make the support for the weathervane.
- And how's this charcoal doing? - It's really good.
We're getting the heat quick in there.
Obviously, we've had to break the charcoal down quite a bit.
- Yeah.
- Cost there's quite, you know, big chunks.
- I mean, is charcoal good for working metal? - Yeah, very good.
You don't need much air going into the fire.
Not so much as you do for coal or coke.
But you can get the heat in very quickly with charcoal.
Now we've just got to get on with the scroll now.
And we'll just start to curve it off the edge with the anvil.
And I'm brushing it with a hammer.
- Brushing it, so it's - Gently brushing it down.
- So it's really thin metal.
- And then, that's it.
Knocking it towards me.
And then just gently elevate.
Here's the start of the scroll.
In the field, the oats are ripe and ready to be harvested.
But the rain keeps coming, and if they're left too long, they'll rot.
The farmers need to predict a week without rain, so they can first cut, then dry the crop.
The cockerel, too, is turning golden, as Simon puts the finishing touches to his masterpiece.
I can see little flakes of gold moving as you touch them with the brush.
- I'm just going to do from his cheek to his beak.
- Right, just that area.
First he coats the copper with glue, then gently applies the gold leaf, using static electricity.
What you have to do is be very careful with the static, cos that's the most important thing, and I'm getting the static from my stubble on my face.
You're using body-made static as you're sort of, lifting - Magnet, yeah, - As a magnet, yeah.
And it's incredible, isn't it, because, I mean, this gold leaf still is beaten by hand, isn't it? That's right, yeah.
It's actually, approximately four millionths of a inch thick.
- Four millionth! - And it's going to protect the weathervane.
- This is making like a complete seal, isn't it? - Yeah.
It's like a membrane of gold around the whole item and it's going to catch the sun, and look proud to be there, and it's not going to corrode, you know? Finally the weathervane is ready to take pride of place at the farm.
- Hello! - Perfect time-keeping.
That's heavy, carrying that up the lane.
- All right? - You be careful.
I will.
- I don't think he was ever in the Boy Scouts.
- If he was, he didn't pay much attention.
Ye of little faith.
- Are you happy with that, Pete? - No, but it'll do.
OK.
I've got it.
This won't be the first cockup we've seen this year, Peter.
- It won't be the last! - Do you need a hand up there? - Yes, please, Alex.
- Nice soft Goodman mattress to land on if I slip.
You can trust my ladders, Peter.
You just need to lift it up here a little bit higher.
Yeah.
OK.
- Right, if you hold it there.
Just slide it on.
- Yeah.
Wow! Give it a spin.
Spin it round, there we are.
- There's a bit of a gust of wind there.
- Bit of a gust, whoa.
- Oh, yeah, it's going.
- There it is.
It's showing us the way the wind's blowing.
- Yeah! - Which is? In the direction of "Don't harvest your oats yet".
- That looks fantastic from down here.
- Fantastic.
- Job well done, Simon.
- Thank you.
A tribute to the craftsmen and women of Britain.
- Yeah.
Definitely.
Drink to that.
- Yeah.
Cheers.
August has been a washout, the worst possible weather for harvesting oats.
But now they've got all the tools they need to predict a dry spell.
Well, that's definitely going up.
So we should have some good weather on the way.
Alex is looking for a rise in pressure with his home-made barometer.
Peter's keeping an eye on the wind direction.
And Ruth's got her own method.
This is my granny's way of telling the weather.
A bit of seaweed hanging outside.
If you get a high humidity it goes all slimy.
For the past few days the atmospheric pressure's been high and the wind's been blowing from the northeast.
This should guarantee a period of dry weather, so the team have decided to harvest the oats this afternoon.
Rather than relying on horsepower, the team are turning to petrol power.
They'll be using a machine invented in the Edwardian age, that was to revolutionise farming: The tractor.
Engineer David White and farmer Harry Williams have brought along The Mogul.
How fast does it go then? It actually goes the speed of a walking horse, which is three miles an hour.
It just has one single speed forward.
It does have the benefit of a reverse gear for manoeuvring.
These were like the earliest attempts of mechanising farming, but within ten years a tractor would be recognisable as you see a modern tractor.
Right.
The tractor's pulling a reaper-binder, one of the most important agricultural machines of the age.
Mr Mudge used this one as a boy and it hasn't been used for half a century.
First it cuts the oats, then ties them into sheaves.
But after a promising start, it all goes a bit haywire.
Just setting this knotter, it's just causing us so many problems.
The knotter, the device that ties the oats into sheaves, has jammed.
This lot isn't tied at all.
Some of the others have got some string holding them in places, but this lot's just been chucked out.
We've finally worked out that where it comes out of the drum it's just pinching the string.
And that's just stopping it coming through, which means it snaps.
If we don't get this right, it's such a sensitive piece of kit, that's it.
Might as well do it by hand.
- Try it now.
- How's that? The harvest has attracted the attention of cinematographer Chris Davis and producer David Upshal.
The first purpose-built cinema in Britain was built in 1907.
By 1914, there were over 3,000.
So there were a lot of little film camera crews out and about in Edwardian Britain? More than you'd think.
The thing that's really happening in Britain is the kind of beginnings of a documentary market.
They've realised people are fascinated with seeing real events, being able to see the King, the Queen, the Prime Minister.
And also seeing themselves.
People are absolutely fascinated with seeing themselves.
You've got a handle on the side of this camera.
Do you have to wind it to make it work? It was the only means of turning the film round, yes.
And you had to do it at a steady pace.
And it should have been 15 frames a second.
But different cameramen would do it at different speeds.
And sometimes, if the projectionist did it at another different speed, it would change the look of the film altogether.
You could make them go faster or slower.
There was no electric motor until later on.
It was all done by hand.
After some adjustments the reaper-binder's back in action, cutting and binding the oats into sheaves.
But precious time's been lost.
Thing is, it's five past four.
It's taken us this long to get this far.
We waited for the weather, and really we've only got another four and a half hours of sunlight, if the weather doesn't, of course, turn.
And there we are.
The perfect sheaf of oats.
We've finally, we think we've got there.
We've done a couple of clean runs, we haven't got choked up, we're tying nicely, the sun has come out.
It's going down, but it's come out, so half the battle is won.
This is the cider the boys made, way back at the beginning.
I hope it's all right.
Oi! - I'll have a little one.
- So it's an interesting colour.
- Is it now? - Now this is proper scrumpy, proper Being as I'm driving, I'd better not have a big one! - You can ask us any day! - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's good stuff, that.
I love me cider.
I think that's a fine scrumpy, that is.
What about you, Mr Mudge? We'll have a barrel from them and take it home with us.
Well, we've got 300 pints! - Let's drink to a gathered harvest.
- Let's do that.
- Cheers.
- Cheers.
- Cheers.
- Slightly premature, but Looks good, though, doesn't it? The oats will be left in the field for a week to dry before being stored in the barn.
With the harvest done, now they can look forward to the village fête.
Alex, Ruth and Peter's time on the Edwardian Farm is drawing to a close.
So it's time to say goodbye to the livestock.
For me this is the end of the poultry year.
I've brought them the next generation, doubled the size of the flock, doubled egg production as well.
So it's been a success, and I'm so pleased with these fellas.
Brilliant.
They're also saying goodbye to the Edwardian way of life that they've experienced for the past year.
Come on! I've really felt this year, so much of an empathy for people involved in the day-to-day fight for life.
For all its romanticism, for all its looking back on the past, the day-to-day realities of Edwardian life in the countryside are hard.
Really hard.
It's the day of the summer fête.
When the Edwardian age ended with the First World War in 1914 it left a legacy of innovations, such as the aeroplane, that would go on to shape the 20th century.
Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen! Come and see the latest innovations of the modern age! Fêtes would exhibit new inventions, like the latest in mechanised farming equipment.
Roll up! They were also a place to have fun and spend money after the hard work of the harvest.
Once raucous and drunken affairs, by the Edwardian age pressure from landowners and the Church had turned them into respectable, well-ordered events.
Mr Mudge has guided them all year through their farming exploits.
Put those on there Alex has threshed some of their oats to remove the grain so Mr Mudge can examine them.
If you can blow them out of your hand it won't be a good sample, but you can't blow them out of your hand, I don't think.
It's a good sample of oats, like.
You've done very well, like, you know? - Steve? - Steve.
- Have you got a glass of cider for Mr Mudge? - Oh, I certainly have.
So, Francis, get you to test our cider, and that'll be the acid test as whether we're proper Southwest farmers, I think.
- There you go, sir.
- I'm leaving the cider to the men.
I think it's a big thank you, and cheers.
- You've done a very good job.
- Cheers.
Good job, like.
Good cider-makers and good farmers all the way round.
You've done a very good job.
By the end of the Edwardian age, reliable, petrol-powered machines were appearing on farms.
Engineers transported their latest models around agricultural shows to encourage farmers to invest.
Having experienced first-hand the advantage of harvesting by machine, Alex is demonstrating the very latest in farming motive power.
Please gather round to marvel at some of the innovations of the age.
You at the back, sir, come forward The Victorian age had introduced steam power.
Now the Edwardian age introduced petrol power.
First and foremost we have the agricultural motor.
A quarter of the size of a steam engine with twice the power.
It was the dawn of a new industrial age of farming that would flourish throughout the 20th century.
actually doing the work of four shire Engineer Fred Lister is demonstrating how quickly they could thresh oats to remove the grain from the crop.
We are now in the 20th century! We have moved on! Where we used to use a flail we now have a machine to do this for us.
You would require four or five men working all day to produce what that produces in about two hours.
Would you please step back? Because we have one of the newest and most innovative machines ever to enter into British agriculture.
Fred's father produced one of the most celebrated agricultural machines of the age: The Lister static engine.
This engine performs the work of at least five horses.
See how a small pint of this new fuel, petrol, can help us to innovate on the farm.
No bales of hay are needed to feed an army of horses.
Mr Lister, can you see a time when there will no longer be horses on the farm? Yes, I'm afraid I can.
The horse is going to be a thing of the past working on a farm.
You have seen the beginnings of a new mechanised age in agriculture.
The internal combustion engine has finally arrived at the British farm.
- Hip-hip! - Hooray! Thank you very much for coming.
The Edwardian age also saw profound changes in society.
Women of Devon, we are in a crisis.
Men are making laws for women in total ignorance of what women themselves actually want.
Suffragettes campaigned for women's votes at events across Britain.
- Women beat men for endurance every time.
- Yeah! Women of Devon But despite an increasingly militant campaign, it wouldn't be until 1928 that women finally got the same voting rights as men.
Help us to win a great victory, and then you will not have lived in vain.
There was an entertainment revolution too.
From the Deep South of America came a new dance that swept through Britain's music halls.
Choreographer Caroline Heinz is introducing it to the fête.
- This is great, this, what's it called? - It's called the Cakewalk.
Cakewalk.
It was a dance that was done on plantations in the South, in America.
It's really, sort of, seems a bit like a comedy dance.
- It has that element of parody about it.
- Well, it is.
In effect they were mimicking the mannerisms of their white masters.
So everything would be exaggerated, so just a simple brush down would become a big brush.
And a brush of the legs, everything would be going.
The thing about the Cakewalk and the original thing about the Cakewalk was, it was competing.
So it was one plantation against another plantation.
And the prize was a cake.
It quickly took off over here and became one of the most popular dance crazes in Edwardian Britain.
Even King Edward VII was rumoured to have had private Cakewalk lessons at the Palace.
It's the final day on the Edwardian Farm.
To store the harvested oats in the barn.
- Horses are so versatile, aren't they? - I know.
I mean, tractors in the field are great, aren't they, but once you're on rough ground like this, the horse has still got such a lot of uses.
Exactly, there's no faster way of getting your last load of oats in, just before it starts raining as well.
I know.
Look at it, ominous.
Mechanisation of the countryside, and the demise of village crafts, were hastened by one of the most devastating events of the 20th century.
It would bring the golden age of Edwardian Britain to a brutal end: The First World War.
It was harvest time in August 1914 when war was declared.
- Oh, hello, Alan.
- Hiya.
Historian Professor Alan Howkins has studied its impact on the countryside.
Cheese here, from the field.
Everybody thought it was going to be a short war.
- Over by Christmas.
- "Over by Christmas," yes, everybody said.
And so people didn't really think about that, but there was a call for volunteers.
And that call, we're told, was met massively.
Interestingly, in the country districts it was a bit different.
You're gathering your oats in August 1914.
Harvest was the absolutely essential part of the year.
To a farmer it was where he made his money.
For the farm worker, it was often taken by the piece.
So you earn probably twice as much a week in your harvest as you did at the rest of the year.
I mean, there must have been a sense of priorities here.
- Not everyone could run off to war here.
- No.
And plenty of farmers didn't want their men to go.
They couldn't just let them go, no matter how patriotic or wonderful it was.
So the rush to join up was not as obvious, particularly in country districts, as people say it was.
It wasn't only men that were called to war.
Horses were too.
Michael Morpurgo wrote the novel Warhorse, about the experience of a farm horse going to war.
Right at the beginning of the war, when the Army came to the villages all over the country, the farmers often sold them, because they were paying good money.
And the Army really needed horses, that's for sure.
But also they would sometimes sequester horses.
They would say, "We're having that horse anyway, whether you like it or not.
" It was a hard and cruel life for four years if they survived.
You need them to pull ambulances, you need them to pull guns, ammunition wagons.
Because I think they thought mechanised stuff was going to come, but It didn't come fast enough.
And besides which, it gets bogged down, doesn't it? I mean, there are really horrible pictures of both men and horses up to here in mud.
- Many men and horses drowned.
- Drowned in mud.
It's estimated half a million horses died in the Great War.
Very few came back.
They suffered exactly as the men suffered.
The awful thing was that even if they survived those terrible four years, right at the end of the war, when it was all over, they only brought 60,000 horses home.
Well, you can reckon that over a million went and 60,000 came home, the truth is many, many of them were sold off to butchers in northern France.
- Right.
- For horsemeat.
- For horsemeat.
- After all they'd done.
The Edwardian age would become known as a golden age, perhaps in the light of the horrors that followed it.
I don't believe the First World War left anybody untouched.
You know, people like my grandmother, who lost her husband and a brother-in-law, two brothers out of three killed.
To her the world before the war, when she talked in her old age, was a much, much better place.
And yes, you know, you could say, "Oh, it's golden ageism".
Well, in some ways it was, it is, but in some ways it was a golden age, because your husband was alive, your brother-in-law was alive.
You know, that personal impact, just can, to my mind, can never, ever be overestimated.
It's an absolutely fundamental fact.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Bye-bye! - Bye.
Bye, chaps.
It's all history.
It's over for the horse.
It's a big shame.
- The countryside's going to be a noisy place.
- Mmm.
- Come on, then.
- Oh, well.
Onwards and upwards.
After a year at Morwellham Quay, it's time to leave Edwardian Britain for good.
I suppose, really, it's become understandable for me that in light of what happened in the Great War, that people did look back on that period, with maybe rose-tinted spectacles, and did think about when sons and fathers were around, and happy days spent in, sort of endless summers.
I know I am never going to read anything about the Edwardian era in the same light again.
It will always come now with this great sort of freight of emotion, and experience.
The farm itself is just a series of buildings and land.
I mean, that's one thing.
But the people who've taken us into their homes and taught us their skills And it's those relationships we've formed that are going to be the hardest things to leave behind.
We're removing ourselves from this community.