Exhibits
The most numerous exhibits are traction engines, tractors and farm machinery, but there are also sections for classic cars and commercial vehicles, working shire horses, rustic crafts, 'bygones' displays, and more. The show also has a market, autojumble, live music and funfair (some of which is powered by the steam engines). The funfair has traditional rides such as gallopers and steam boats, as well as modern ones like the "World Fair Wheel" which was sited in Manchester for the millennium. It is the biggest gathering of fairground organs in the UK.
The show regularly attracts around 200,000 visitors, and there can be 30,000 people on site, making the fair the fifth largest population centre in Dorset, after Bournemouth, Poole, Weymouth and Christchurch (the population of the historic town of Dorchester being only half that number).
A speciality of the show is the display of traction engines and steam rollers performing the work for which they were designed. Such displays include heavy haulage, threshing, sawing logs, ploughing and road-making. The main arena of the show is purposely sited on the slope of a hill to allow both steam- and internal combustion-powered machinery to demonstrate their capacity for heavy load hauling. One of the main displays is the "Showman's Line up", in the vintage fairground section, which is thought to be the largest collection of showman's engines in the world.
Since 2003, the show has contracted its own radio station, Steam Fair FM, broadcasting 24 hours daily from the Saturday prior to the show, to the Monday following – 10 days in all. The station, which is also streamed on the internet, covers show news and views, weather and other relevant information with plenty of listener dedications and a format of "Vintage Hits". During the event, the station is advertised on roads in the surrounding area and provides traffic news for drivers using the A354 Blandford to Salisbury road that passes the show site.
The end of the fair is marked with a Thanksgiving Service on the Sunday, at 12 noon, and takes place on the stage of Dean's Bioscope, the Silver Bell, organised for many years by Chris Edmonds, the Lay Chaplain until his death in 2007.
For the 40th anniversary, in 2008, the organisers recreated the very first fair, by tracing all of the exhibits that were displayed at the 1968 show.
Read more about this topic: Great Dorset Steam Fair
Famous quotes containing the word exhibits:
“After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)