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.
Field maps show that until the early 1900’s our fields were just that. The land moved from one owner to the next until eventually they were consolidated and the old stone shepherd’s hut that perched where we are now was added to and this place became another one of the houses that sit on the spring line. The farmhouse was a simple, two up, two down building. A tiny barn with a spring running beneath it allowed it to function as a dairy. In the early days an old ram pump that is now defunct (and on our to do list of repairs), had the licence to supply the water to the hamlet of houses above us. But Hillside did not have a history mapped in anything more than hedges and the springs that must have given the sun-drenched fields their value.
Making this place into somewhere that felt less perched and more anchored on the hill has been our mission. To ground the buildings and give the house a habitable domain that gives way seamlessly to the fields has been where the garden has helped to focus our connection. We have done this mostly through massaging the land to recontour it into a plateau that connects the buildings, and have made minimal moves in terms of hard built structure. A stone wall and reclaimed stone steps replaced the concrete slope that the farmer used to access the house. A breezeblock wall connects the house to the tin barns and holds the back track securely on the slope up behind, which is accessed by monolithic cast concrete steps. Oak sleeper steps and crushed concrete paths provide the backbone the property never had.
It is inevitable that one thing leads to the next and, when we excavated the pond three years ago, the arisings were trundled up the hill to make a new plateau to ground the old tin barns to the west. This move extended the flat ground around the buildings to meet the plum orchard, which formed the natural stopping point for this next garden chapter. The new ground was where we began the sand garden last year, which builds upon the experiment I started ten years ago by planting and seeding into the farmer’s rubble around the barns. I will come back to the sand garden a little later in the season to provide an update of what fared well after this deluge of a winter.
The bank above the sand garden and the track that accesses the barns have been sitting quietly waiting for a timely moment to start the third chapter and conclusion to this space. The change in level between the bank and our meadow above it is precipitous and held together with one of the broken and now repaired hedges. But in the back of my mind I’d always imagined a dry-stone wall here to continue the spine beyond the barns. There is an old stone wall in the lane above us that runs parallel that provided the precedent, and I knew from walking the lane frequently what it offered in terms of making it feel significant and grounded as a place.
As is the way with the best of artisans, we had to wait to get Tom Trouton and his team to site, but each process of building the wall was a delight to witness. We chose a stone from a quarry in Dorset, our neighbouring county. A Jurassic limestone of about 160 million years, with fossils and time built into it. There are no foundations to the wall, just as there are no foundations to the house, simply a small cut into the bank to disturb it as little as possible. Enough to make a ledge on which a wide base, almost a metre in places, provided the footing. The wall leans into the bank a little so there is a beautiful batter and it tapers as it reaches the finished level before the cock and hen capping stones are put in place.
We made the wall in two phases, the first was started almost exactly a year ago when the ground was dry enough for access. A second load of stone was brought in during September with the hope of starting work shortly after, but of course rain stopped play for six months and it was early April before the guys eventually returned to complete our line in the landscape. A small team of young wallers learning an ancient skill and keeping it alive.
The wall will have a life of its own and is ultimately so much greater than the sum of its many parts. It faces south, so it has a warm side that reflects heat as you walk its length. We do so daily, making our way up to a gate which gives way to the plum orchard and then another where we step up into the orchid meadow above us. Feeling the heat in the evening and its cool side as we pass through the hedge behind it. We have planted primroses in its shadow where previously the bank baked and hope to see hart’s tongue ferns and white violets taking hold. The wall is amazing for being completely reliant on gravity and the careful balancing act of each stone being chosen to sit alongside its neighbour. Between each stone there is a space, a hiding place for slow worms, beetles, possibly lizards and all the company they keep to make this wall their home.
I have begun to plant the banks below the wall with Judas trees to capture the sunshine and an understory low enough that we will one day be able to look up through their trunks and on to their shadows falling on the wall. More on this planting as it begins to take hold, for now it is incomplete and living between my head, the frame of seedlings and the time it will take to grow them on for a second round of planting in the autumn.
To think that the many parts to the wall will move as one with the settling of the land, to sit right here and join its predecessors that move quietly along the contours of the valley feels like a good thing to have given this place. It is a privilege to have been able to create this little legacy here. Something for the future that makes this place feel connected to the past and tended.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 18 May 2024
