Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Peter Ginn and Alex Langlands take on a Shropshire farm for a year, working it entirely with Victorian-era tools, methods, and clothing. They live in the farmhouse as it would have stood in the 1880s, cooking on a coal-fired range, ploughing with horses, and following the farming calendar from lambing through harvest to the depths of winter. The series treats the year as an experiment: what did it actually take, in labor and skill, to keep a household and a farm running before mechanization arrived. Guest experts turn up to teach period crafts like butter-making, brick-firing, and hedge-laying, and the trio's mistakes are left in rather than edited out, from a difficult calving to the daily grind of laundry without machines. The result works as social history told through physical work rather than narration alone, with the changing seasons on the farm giving the series its structure.