The farm near the A47 became a charity - The William Scott Abbott Trust – in 1964 and has been inviting groups, schools and individuals onto the site to teach them about food and farming ever since.
But the farm’s history dates back much further – all the way to the Domesday Book, in fact.
General manager Lee Scowen said: “We’re asking our visitors to dig through their old photos and stories of the farm during lockdown and share them with us on social media.
“We’re not expecting memories from 1,000 years ago but it would be lovely to see and hear people’s memories of visiting the farm, especially at a time when people can’t visit us themselves.”
Sacrewell Farm closed its doors to visitors just before the lockdown was announced, but key members of the team are still on-site to care for the animals and maintain the land.
Lee added: “We’re an educational charity so are using our social media channels, such as Facebook, to share some educational activities and teach people about the animals on our site through fun quizzes.
“We thought one way of keeping people engaged in what we’re doing would be to ask them to share their stories and memories with us, which is why we’re launching this campaign. We hope we’ll uncover some stories in living memory that we’ve not heard before.”
During the Second World War, Sacrewell became a base for the Women’s Land Army who took to the land to keep Britain farming and feed the nation. In recent years, Sacrewell completed the Sacrewell Mill project with a £1.2 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and funds from the trust which tells the story of what life was like at the farm from the perspective of a couple of the Land Girls who lived there.
“We’ve already started to gather people’s memories of Sacrewell in recent projects, but we’d like to uncover more. We know that people who visited us as children now bring their children and even grandchildren. We’ve changed a lot since the early days and now have a visitor centre, but it’s the memories of the people who come back and visit us time and time again that keep William Scott Abbott’s vision of taking farm education to the masses going – and his mission is particularly poignant at times like these when we’re once again turning to British farmers to feed the nation.”
Sacrewell is asking people to dig out old photos and share them on its Facebook page or Instagram (@Sacrewell) and tag it in the caption so it they can be shared on their pages.
