To take part in Heritage Open Days, in Lincolnshire or elsewhere, you need to fulfil one of these requirements. If your site opens regularly and doesn’t charge a fee, such as a park or ruin, you can still take part but you must either open part of the site that isn’t usually accessible or put on a special event. This doesn’t need to mean putting on a full-scale re-enactment or a huge exhibition, and could be as easy as having volunteers on hand to offer tours, organising a quiz or putting on a trail for children. Churches that are usually kept locked and other buildings that only open by appointment qualify as “not usually open”. All events must be free, so if you usually charge for admission then this fee must be waived, although you can still charge for extras such as refreshments or guidebooks and ask for donations. Please note running a free tour if visitors still have to pay an entrance fee does not count. We realise organisers have to recoup their costs, but the festival is a great opportunity to promote your site with thousands of brochures going out across the county and tens of thousands more people seeing your event online. Each year visitors tell us they have discovered places on their doorstep they had never been to and will now be visiting again.

Please tick all applicable. Your event does not need to run for all ten days and could be as short as a single hour long guided tour if necessary. Saturday and Sunday are the most popular days with organisers and visitors, but many people like to visit during the week, and these days can be great for evening events such as talks, concerts or candle lit tours. If you know there are other historic sites in your town or village or nearby, it’s a great idea to coordinate your events on the same day or weekend so there is more going on which will be an added attraction to visitors. You might also like to think of working together with similar sites elsewhere in the county as we know many people travel to Lincolnshire during the festival specially to visit windmills, pumping stations and churches that are otherwise only open infrequently.

Please let us know if you will be limiting visitor numbers at your event, and if so how many visitors you plan to admit.

Please indicate either yes or no and give a daytime contact telephone number, booking link and/or email address. This will be printed in the brochure so think carefully about who will handle the bookings, particularly if your event is likely to be popular, as you will still receive calls after your event is fully booked. Heritage Lincolnshire can handle all your bookings for you and provide you with a list of attendees for a fee of £25, and you will also have your brochures delivered to your door.

Use these tick boxes to tell visitors about the facilities at your event. Visitors will appreciate knowing if you will be selling refreshments, and whether there are parking or toilet facilities and what kind of disabled access and facilities there are. Knowing whether dogs are welcome, and if outdoor clothing is required are also useful for visitors wanting to plan their day. Please also tell us if your event meets this year’s theme. Visitor feedback has been overwhelmingly positive for ten day festival. Sadly there are still occasions of visitors unable to make events due to other commitments, so we have added a label which points out if an event or opening is especially for the festival, and cannot be visited at other times of the year. If not, please note that this doesn’t mean that admission has to be free on other days, but that visitors have an indication on whether they can plan other visits if they miss your Heritage Open Days event.

Images of events and sites really enhance the quality and appearance of the brochure. Although we cannot guarantee that we will use every image sent to us, we will try and feature as many as possible, and use at least one when posting your event on the Heritage Open Days website. To do this we need your confirmation that the image is yours to share and not under copyright, and that you are happy for us to use it for this purpose.