Steam Plough Club at Crockey Hill (8th - 11th September, 2016)
This is one of a series of pages I have uploaded to illustrate facets of the steam rallies we have attended in the UK. Click here for the 2016 introduction and overall index.
The Steam Plough Club (http://www.steamploughclub.org.uk/) was founded in 1966, its slogan is "Keeping ploughing engines, implements and skills alive". The serendipity of having the National and World Ploughing Championships at Crockey Hill near York this year offered a chance for a public celebration which would showcase the activities of the club and particularly its members, of which I am proud to number myself as one even though I do not own a suitable engine and have no aspiration to do so. I have always said that the working areas are the highlight of any steam rally we visit and to me 'steam ploughing' is the 'blue ribbon event' as illustrated by the numerous video clips I have uploaded to my YouTube Channel. Just under 30 (cable) ploughing engines were present, comfortably the greatest gathering of such machines ever and they represented a wide variety of the type, albeit the vast majority were built by Fowler who dominated the scene even more than Aveling and Porter did the steam roller market. Obviously the highlight for the aficionados of the genre was the demonstration of 'roundabout steam ploughing' using the unique Howard engine. What may not be immediately apparent is the fact that also gathered apart from the steam engines was an array of ploughs and other implements, like the engines, lovingly restored.
We arranged to visit for two of the four days, sadly our first day (Saturday) was so overcast as to be almost totally useless for photography and shooting video. All meaningful recording had to be squeezed into the Sunday when effectively the show was over by 15.00. Consequently, the stills record is adequate (just) but I would have liked at least another half day for the video. At the end of the day's play on the Saturday, the engines were gathered together and the committee, who had put in a huge amount of work, took a bow. What a monument to 'diversity'!
As the sun finally came out properly for the first time, this was a bird's eye view of the line up (click here for a video clip).
Choose the page you are interested in and within that, click on a thumbnail for a larger image. Then click again to return to the page.
David Collidge's Steam Scenes website (http://www.steamscenes.org.uk/) is a fount of information and was a great help in compiling these pages.
