When, in March 2005, I peered over the gate down the farm track to the long lime-washed house with rotting window frames, I knew this was going to be my home. To right and left was dereliction; a roofless stone threshing barn with scraps of the original thatched roundhouse, and a cob stable block with its dovecote of nine perches and tiny slate sills, roof caving in, covered in “dangerous, do not enter” signs.
A year later I lie in bed listening to the wind battering the ruined barns still further. Unprotected cob melts in the rain as surely as if it were gingerbread, so I cross my fingers that there’s more left to work with than a heap of cobby rubble, rotten timbers and smashed slate.
The process of planning the restoration of the listed barns, one early post-medieval, the other late 18th century, is more than slow; it creeps unwillingly in some kind of direction, often backwards. The barns are to be restored to agricultural use: a proper farm workshop; somewhere to keep convalescing livestock; a place to rear poultry; a hayloft to keep feedstuffs; a stable for a big, slow horse; another for making cheese and butter; over-wintering for the dreamed of Dexters or Devon Rubies; a farrowing pen for Berkshire sows and their piglets; a space for bats and barn owls. The Borough and County Councils, Natural England, Environment Agency, Devon Biodiversity Records Centre, structural engineers, and ecologists all have to be consulted.
Two years on tenders are sought from local builders with traditional skills and sympathy for working with cob, oak and stone. They swarm over the site, work specifications in hand, gingerly poking at the realities, hard hatted and serious. Finally, signatures are added to much discussed contracts. I try to make the major mental adjustment needed for a troupe of unfamiliar people entering my daily life for 14 months.
November 2007 and the farmyard already looks like a building site due to our preparation efforts: electric cabling trenched underground, site hut area levelled, tin lean-tos demolished, oak boarding taken down and stored for re-use, self-seeded ash saplings torn up to enable access. I have splinters from sifting the rubbish for firewood and old fittings, my boots constantly muddy as the scalpings that kept feet dry in the farmyard are pressed deeply into clay with the comings and goings of heavy machinery.
Two weeks later the builders are on site; from scratch they build a composting toilet and it is a thing of beauty, the door handle a small branch. If they put this much effort into the barns, I’ll be beaming forever.
A shiny, yellow tele-handler is hired. In a couple of hours the remaining rag slates on the barn roof are removed, the few in good order neatly stacked.
The skyline changes daily; my home is in flux and unfamiliar. The dogs snoop round the site to reinforce their scent markings and suss out new smells and bits of dropped lunch, but the site is litter free and spotless, apart from it turning into a moonscape.
At Christmas we celebrate knowing one barn is wrapped inside and out, tarps secured over the walls; that demolition has stopped and building has started. Much of the work is hidden behind scaffolding and protective hessian, so I put on a hard hat and run my hands over repaired walls and oak lintels, imagining inhabitation by pig and cow.
February 2008 and the building work + the weather + the season = unavoidable heaps of mud. Unbelievably copious amounts of the stuff; you open the front door and it pushes into the house unasked and unwanted.
As we move into the spring there are lots of small decisions to be made and tasks to fulfil. I see more and more new elements emerge: cob blocks where once there was air; triangular windows repaired; new footings for the roundhouse; a damp-proof floor for the workshop; huge beams of green oak shaped into roof trusses. I cross fingers for a glorious and long summer, a warm autumn; the builders will be on site for another year.
Published in The Landsman April/May 2008 Issue 7
