BARN RESTORATION

When, in March 2005, we first peered over the gate down the farm track to the long lime-washed house with rotting window frames, to right and left was dereliction; a roofless stone threshing barn with scraps of the original thatched roundhouse, and a cob barn and stable block with its dovecote of nine perches and tiny slate sills, roof caving in, covered in “dangerous, do not enter” signs.

The barns, one early post-medieval, the other late 18th century have now been fully restored for agricultural use: a proper farm workshop; somewhere to keep livestock over winter; a place to rear waterfowl and poultry; a hayloft to keep feedstuffs; a farrowing pen for Berkshire sows and their piglets, a resource space for our smallholder training courses, timber storage and a home for bats and barn owls.