Our time here has been fraught with difficulties. We’ve worked really hard to try to bring our home up to a half-decent standard, from its “one windowpane from derelict” as it was when we moved in. Some of what we’ve done has turned out, with hindsight, to be a massive waste of time, effort and money. Just occasionally though, we realise that we have managed to achieve something a bit miraculous.

The field is one such thing. When we viewed the house, we wandered around it by climbing in from the public footpath. It was a wasteland. Bracken and brambles ruled and there was little to hint that it could be a wonderful space. There was rubbish at the far end, where fly-tipping had been going on and rubbish blocking the field entrance from the house where the previous owner used to lob her rubbish over the fence from the garden. She’d dumped so much rubbish that we were unable to access the field from the garden and we had to approach it from the other end and hack our way in. I’m not talking about garden waste – it included items such as an old slide projector, a vacuum cleaner, a motorbike and a whole host of other things. We often joke that there is a whole Ford Anglia (car) buried in there somewhere!

We have, over the last seven years, hacked back all of the brambles and bracken to enable us to mow it into a meadow. We’ve planted nearly 100 trees in it in an avenue down the sides. You can see some of the willows in this shot – they are big-ish trees now!

Our efforts are rewarded by it becoming a beautiful space with loads of wildlife. We mow it about 3-4 times a year, allowing the grasses and wild flowers to complete lifecycles in between mows and we leave some areas unmown although we do still keep the brambles and bracken down in them. DM is mowing it today because we’ve got bad weather forecast from the middle of the week and if previous years are anything to go by, we may not get another chance this year. Here is my family – DM mowing with JD and Lola enjoying the sunshine!