The milking barn yard used to be a very different place. The access track to the barn descended at a perilous angle down the slope, with everything on the angle to save digging into the hill and making up the ground with retaining walls. The yard itself was poured in a patchwork of concrete slabs by the farmer before us in characteristic ad hoc fashion. It was an ugly place, but we liked it in spite of that and although I always knew the yard itself would have to go, the space it carved out for the little barn was important. 

When I brought in the granite trough to provide the centre of gravity and frame the yard, the concrete buckled like a pie crust under the weight of the forklift and, in the hiatus whilst we were doing up the buildings, seeding weeds grew back into the cracks. The interlopers were not noteworthy in themselves, but the airiness of these pioneers refined the roughness of the broken concrete and the feeling that this place was being reclaimed had resonance. I watched and thought and took away from living with the yard in this halfway state the importance of it being a place that felt gently occupied.