Ten cameras pointed at a farm.
Gawping is what it is. Nobody watching a ewe on a webcam at three in the morning is doing research. There is no audio, there is no zoom, and nothing is edited, because a camera left running on a field cannot be cut into a better year than the one you actually had.
Every camera, and what is on it now.
Live where a stream exists, and a stamped still where one does not. The still is not a failure state — it is the fallback the uptime commitment is written against.
Live
Fixed · 24 mm
The Yard
Live
Fixed · wide · 3 m
The Lambing Shed
Live
Fixed · low · 2.4 m
The Hop Yard
Live
Fixed · macro · 0.9 m
The Beehive
Live
Fixed · high · 6 m
The Brewery Floor
Live
Fixed · overhead · 2.8 m
The Pub Pass
Live
Fixed · 24 mm
The Weighbridge
Live
Fixed · 35 mm
The Hedgerow
Live
Fixed · 50 mm · elevated
The Big Field
Live
Fixed · 28 mm
The Gate
The lambing shed is free to everybody, member or not, and always will be. The other nine come with Belonging, including at the free tier.
Why a camera pointed at a field is the honest bit of this website.
Everything else here is written. The chapters are edited, the photographs are chosen, the numbers are the ones we decided to publish. A camera bolted to a grain store is none of those things. It shows the drought as clearly as the harvest and there is no version of it that flatters a bad year.
That is the whole argument for Gawping and it is why the cameras are on the fields that matter rather than the ones that photograph well. The weighbridge is the least attractive camera on the estate and the most consequential: every trailer that crosses it is a line in the only honest account of the year.
It is also why the lambing camera is free. The most compelling three weeks of the farming year should not be something you have to pay for, and charging for it would be the cheapest thing this platform could possibly do.
- No audio, on any camera, ever
- No pan, tilt or zoom for anybody outside the farm office
- No camera pointed at a public footpath, a neighbour’s land or the highway
- Nothing edited, nothing looped, nothing staged for the feed
01/ 03
How ten cameras get onto a website.
A bracket, and a decision about where to point it.
Every camera here is fixed. Choosing the angle is therefore the only creative act in the entire system, and once the bracket is bolted on, that is the shot for the next several years.
The rule we apply is simple: it points at this farm, at something that actually happens, and at nothing anybody else owns.
- Cameras
- 10, all fixed
- Public PTZ
- None
- Highest mount
- 6.5 m
A 4G bridge, because the fibre stops at the road.
There is no fibre past the yard. Six cameras run on wired ethernet back to the farm office; the four in the fields run over 4G with a solar panel and a battery, which is why the field cameras are the ones that drop out in December.
Total upstream across all ten is about nineteen megabits. That is the ceiling, and it is why nothing here is 4K.
- Wired
- 6 cameras
- 4G and solar
- 4 cameras
- Upstream
- ~19 Mbps total
A stamped still whenever any of that fails.
When a feed goes down the page does not show you a spinner, a black rectangle or a stock photograph. It shows the last good frame, the minute it was taken, and the reason the stream stopped.
Ninety-nine per cent uptime over a rolling ninety days means roughly twenty-two hours a year when that still is all there is. We would rather tell you that now than have you find it out in March.
- Commitment
- 99% rolling 90 days
- Worst camera
- 97.8%
- Fallback
- Stamped still
The cameras, in numbers.
Uptime is the proportion of minutes in a rolling ninety-day window in which a live stream was actually served. Where it was not, the page served a stamped still instead.
Everything else in Gawping.
Thirteen pages behind the cameras: what to watch when, what the rig is, what the rules are, and what happens when it all falls over.
What to watch when
A table of the whole year, and which camera is worth your time in it.
Lambing
The three weeks this whole thing is built around, and the only free camera.
Harvest
Three weeks that decide the year, across three cameras.
How it works
Brackets, bandwidth, solar panels and the ninety-nine per cent.
The rules
What the cameras will never do, and where they will never point.
The archive
Time-lapses, the harvest record and the clips worth keeping.
Notifications
One alert when the first lamb arrives. Not eleven.
For schools
Whiteboard-ready feeds, a lesson plan and no sign-up.
Offline
What the page does when there is no picture, and why.
Highlights
Ninety seconds each, and the reason people came back.
At night
What eight of these cameras see after dark, including the badgers.
Embedding
The rules for putting a camera on a school or parish website.
Questions
The nine we get every week, including the one about the cows.
None of this is a broadcast. It is ten fixed brackets, nineteen megabits and a promise not to point any of it at anything that is not ours. When it works you get a farm. When it does not you get the last good frame and the time it was taken, which is still more honest than a loading spinner.
One email when the first lamb arrives.
Not eleven. We send one message at the start of lambing, one when the combine goes into the first field, and nothing else from these cameras all year.
- The first lamb of the season
- The first day of harvest
- Nothing else. No weekly digest, no highlights round-up.
