I remember as a child trespassing around the grounds of a derelict house in our nearby market town like it was yesterday. The Vicarage was due to come up for auction and curiosity had got the better of my mother who liked nothing more than a house in disrepair and a project. We had already moved into one of our own a few years earlier, with its 50 years of neglect and acre of wilderness that was literally pressing up against the windows. Taking that project on had made my mother’s mother cry, but the excitement of decay and dereliction lives on in me now. The imaginings of a time lost and then the process of careful restoration, identifying what has value from the old chapter and life in it for the next.

Builders had bulldozed a break in an overgrown hedge and barricaded it with temporary fencing, which we easily breached. To mum’s dismay, and my rather less adventurous relief, we couldn’t break in, but we circled the house peering in through the windows we could get to until I lost interest and wandered into the overgrown garden. A place I knew how to explore from our experience of unearthing our own long forgotten garden and from being a scout for my parents, who were too grown up to burrow into impenetrable thickets.