Roadless 90 DVD
For all those customers who have pre-ordered the ‘Roadless 90′ DVD – the post production is now complete and we are shipping all the orders, so please expect your DVDs in the next week. If you haven’t got a copy yet you can order ‘Roadless 90‘ online today. Thank you for your patience, and interest in our DVDs.
LAND OF TRADITION
DVD Documentary, Colour, 16:9 widescreen aspect
59 minutes, Price £15.95
This is the story of some of the farming traditions passed down by rural communities surrounding the Norfolk town of King’s Lynn. Using archive film, photographs and dramatised sequences this DVD follows the lives of those who attempted to make a living from the land.
Traditional skills and crafts featured in this programme include wildfowling, the gathering of reeds for thatching, the making of wicker objects and rugs and the digging of peat for fuel. Women would sell butter they had churned or cider they had brewed at the local markets. Poachers supplemented their family’s meals by trapping game, risking severe punishment if caught. Also featured are the blacksmith and the miller whose skills underpinned the rural communities.
Pioneering businesses, such as the canners Beaulahs and Lin-Can, provided employment for local families. Archive film of the full canning process in the 1960s is featured. The factory’s fieldsman is seen making the necessary quality checks on the carrots and strawberries before they were harvested and transported to the factory. It was a precision operation with every effort made to ensure the produce was canned at its freshest.
Many other rural traditions were enjoyed by the men and women. As the fen land froze over, workers would put on skates and compete for prizes by racing each other on the ice. The seasons of the year were marked and celebrated with events like Plough Monday and the harvest festival, which signified the end of the agricultural year.
For out more about this DVD or buy online now at Primetime Video
MUD, DYKES & DRAGLINES
DVD Documentary, Colour, 16:9 widescreen aspect
57 minutes, Price £15.95 + P&P
Some of the finest farmland in Britain was once under water, or so wet that it was useless for most kinds of farming. Over the centuries, ways have been found to turn those bogs, fens and salt-marshes into good productive land. This DVD programme uses archive film taken in Lincolnshire, working demonstrations and preserved machinery, to show some of the ways that this was done.
Prisoners are seen at work building earth walls to reclaim land from the sea; a technique – and a labour force! – that has been used since the 1700s, or even earlier.
Vintage machinery, Ruston-Bucyrus and Priestman dragline excavators and their hydraulic successors, dig and clear dykes and drains. A pair of steam ploughing engines can also be seen hauling a drag across drains to clear them of mud and silt. Steam was also an important power source for the pumping engines that drew the water up off the land and into embanked waterways that led it away to the sea. Steam, diesel and electric pumps are all featured in film going back to pumping station building and modification in the 1940s and 50s.
Man-power would always have been a key feature of land drainage work, and this production includes demonstrations and explanations of tools such as sloughs, ritters, foot irons and tile hooks when under-draining fields.
Drainage is revealed to be a fascinating process, without which the world would have been a hungrier place.
