One of the joys of being part of this place is in the doing and the making good and the betterment. When we arrived, we started by disentangling the runs of barbed wire and removing the old bedsteads that had been pushed into the broken hedges. It was good to replace these missing teeth. In some cases whole runs of hedge that had been eaten away by the livestock or overwhelmed by elder. A decade on and the hedges run in unbroken lifelines to join the high ground with the low and our hedges with the ones that connect away into the distance.

Of note, we uncovered an old springhead with a rough hewn stone trough that had been all but submerged by years of trampling hooves, but there was little else to suggest that the land had been invested in as it had been in the older houses that surround us. You can trace the prosp­erity of the old manor houses in the walls that run back up the hill to the older properties. They mark an earlier time where boundaries were laid down in the stone that was cleared from the fields. The old walls each bear the signature of their maker and now the patination of time. Most are neglected and crumbled, lichened and overtaken by signs of the ancient woodland that once would have dominated the valley. Dog’s Mercury, bluebell, archangel and wood anemone and a cage of bramble that hides them entirely in the summer months.