As part of the project the Surrey Heritage team engaged people living in the Surrey Hills through community workshops. The Old Surrey Downs Project took up the offer of an archive based workshop. Chris Skinner project officer comments;

“I just wanted to say how much we valued the day we spent at The History Centre. It was the first time I had  visited and I was amazed at the treasures it held in store - the image of one of our volunteers holding an ancient Court Roll and actually reading it is one that I will never forget.

Thanks to the opportunity provided by the Surrey Hills Food and Farming project, we were able to locate some photographic images of the North Downs from the 1920s, clearly showing the effects of sheep grazing on the landscape, as well as some images of cattle grazing on a downland site that we thought had only been previously grazed by sheep. We also discovered a map dated 1812 which supplied some much-needed information about the land we currently use as hold-back land for our sheep and those court rolls also referred to sheep from Banstead, so perhaps there was a "Banstead breed" after all... the research continues.

I am confident that we will have some interesting information to present to other groups participating in the Surrey Hills Food and Farming project, but must point out that this is only the start - our visit to the History Centre has generated a huge amount of interest and enthusiasm and new leads for research. We now consider that it will be an ongoing project for us.

Our visit to the History Centre will help us to achieve our aim of raising public awareness of the interdependence between farming and wildlife and we consider ourselves very fortunate in being able to participate in this initiative.

Thank you for such an interesting and productive day”