When we arrived here fifteen years ago, the barns sat perched on the edge of the fields falling immediately away and below them. A string of barbed wire kept the cattle in the field and the bare minimum of ground was left around the barns to provide for their function as winter shelter. A broken concrete yard to the back made a space on the leeward side and a muddy track with the jutting angles of hardcore pushing through it led up from the field. The barn is not a good-looking building, but we loved its collage of rusted corrugated tin, lichen encrusted asbestos and thrown together nature.

That first summer we pulled the line away from the barn to give it a breathing space and re-fenced the field to graze sheep in what would soon be planted as orchard. Nature came back immediately to fill the void of the empty barns. The bindweed from the banks at the back crept across the dried mud of the hoof indented floors and brambles that had been kept in check sprung their thorny wands, which cascaded through the windows. Grasses and nettles and the high summer flare of epilobium leapt from the rubble and threw their shadows on the tin and once the interlopers began their pioneering the ugliness of the buildings took on a certain charm.