The sand garden has already settled in since it was planted just over a year ago and is having its influence in the pull to move west towards the evening light that pours from the end of the valley. With its top dressing of free-draining sand, batter into the sunshine and associated planting palette, it has quickly become somewhere with its own distinct identity. Spending time there has opened up a new way of looking at this place and the walk to the barns is no longer the terminus, but a point of gravity. A new chapter and an enrichment of the whole.

Over the winter we completed the dry-stone wall that backdrops the bank above and, in a long and convoluted exercise, we rammed a low seating wall at the base of the bank. Cast in an arc that steps down with the slope, we dry-packed a local aggregate so that it remains porous and we hope in time, a better home for lichens, mosses and invertebrates. The wall was made in response to a colleague who noted that there is nowhere to sit in the garden. Something which, until it was pointed out, I hadn’t clocked, because I am mostly doing and probably don’t spend enough time pausing. The seating wall is something of a revelation in my sixtieth year and from this vantage point we have the opportunity of slowing down and taking in the newly focussed view down the valley. A local church we have visited, but had never noticed from our land before, suddenly appeared as an eyecatcher amongst the trees and a whole new connection to the barns reframed our relationship to this corner of our land.