Crofton Steaming and Star Gazing Evening

Our night time steaming offers the rare opportunity for visitors to see our engines working into the night . We’ll be running our two beam engines into the twilight with lower than normal lighting in our engine house. This will give an impression of Crofton in the Georgian era when it first operated.

Since we will be pumping well in to the night we will also offer a unique dark skies opportunity to star gaze in a ‘dark skies’ area to help us celebrate our evening steaming, towards the end of the evening when it is fully dark, local astronomers from the Newbury Astronomy Society will have their telescopes set up for visitors to marvel at the heavens (weather permitting!). Richard Fleet of the Society will give two presentations during the evening entitled “The Milky Way and our Place in the Galaxy”, first lecture at 7.00pm and the second at 8pm, so you will have plenty of opportunity to see our engines working and to take in the talk. Once it is dark there will be plenty of opportunity to view the night sky through the telescopes of members of the society. Please dress warmly and do bring binoculars. If you are a fan of engineering, industrial heritage or star gazing this will be a perfect opportunity to enjoy an evening in the beautiful Vale of Pewsey. A great evening for adults and older children.

We’ll have refreshments available from our Pop-Up tea tent and we’ve invited the excellent fresh Pizza makers ‘Pizza Lola’ to site so visitors will be able to go home with both minds and stomachs filled.

Entry is £10 per adult, under 16 go free. Please visit our web site for more details about this Special Event, Crofton Beam Engines and our steaming days.

Steam Experience

We offer a very unique and special opportunity for individuals who want to spend a day learning every aspect of how Crofton's Engines work from firing the boilers to driving the engines to book this very special experience visit our web site. This experience makes an ideal present for someone who enjoys living history and engineering. There are only two places available this year for this experience, one on Saturday the 28th and one on Sunday the 29th of September.