Farming machinery of the past put through its paces

Little Casterton Working Weekend takes visitors back to the early days of farm mechanisation

The Little Casterton Working Weekend near Stamford in Lincolnshire has been on top of many a vintage enthusiast’s wish list for more than 20 years.

For two days the Rutland countryside reverberates to a cacophony of differing sounds as machinery dating from no later than the 1950s is put to work on numerous cultivation and harvesting tasks.

A pair of steam ploughing sets work with balance ploughs and cultivators while others drive a Ransomes mill and elevator and an International stationary baler.

Steam power is gentle and subtle. The same, however, cannot not be said for the soundtrack of the massed crawlers working hard on the sloping soil of the host and well-known collector Arthur Hinch’s farm.

As this was the last year of the event on its present site, and because of the proximity of the former Allis Chalmers factory at Essendine, Arthur brought out a fleet of big Allis tracklayers to be joined by others from Caterpillar and International.

The noise from these machines dominated the site and one could imagine what it was like back in the 1930s and 40s when the county was full of this big kit as it tried to farm profitably in the hungry Thirties and to feed a nation in the war-torn Forties.

Indeed, the 1938 Allis Chalmers LO model was particularly noteworthy for the sound emanating from its straight-through exhaust pipe.

Straight pipes were the order of the day as very few machines had silencers fitted to stifle the superb soundtracks.

Some of this sound dated back a century as several 100-year-old tractors were working in the cultivation area.

International, Saunderson, Alldays, Weeks-Dungey, Parrett, Fordson and Case tractors were all there.

Plenty of others from the inter-war period were in action, too, from the likes of Massey Harris, Marshall, Minneapolis Moline, John Deere, Rumley and Huber models.

For many though it was the harvesting action which set the pulses racing with a 1928 Holt combine pulled by a CAT D5 joined by two Allis All Crops pulled by Allis M and Cletrac AG crawlers, while a solitary IH binder was behind a JD BN.

Gathering up straw was an Allis Chalmers U pulling a 7’ AC side rake and a Fordson E27N on a Lister Blackstone example.

Baling was done with an Allis B and AC Roto baler and a Nuffield Universal 4 operating a Bamford BL baler.

There were even period bale collecting machines in action too.

Add to this flypasts by Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft and you get an idea of how evocative this event was.

Thankfully, it will continue nearby on similar lines under a new committee next year.

A Birmingham-built 1918 Alldays tractor pulling a riding plough in the cultivation area; a long-wing Fordson N pulls a bale trailer being loaded by a McCormick while more bales are being produced by the Bamford BL baler powered by an Enfield diesel engine, below left; and a 1938 Allis Chalmers LO crawler in action.