About

We have a patch of about 5 acres in the Avon Valley, deep in the beautiful South Hams countryside in Devon, England. We started out in 1986 with 2.5 acres of weedy, grassy, featureless ground which had been farmed with cereal crops relentlessly for years. It was pretty devoid of trees or hedgerows to provide any habitat for wildlife. A year later we were offered the tiny “chocolate box” thatched cottage that adjoined the land. We couldn’t really afford it, but those were the heady days of irresponsible lending and it wasn’t too difficult to convince someone to give us a mortgage. So, in the spring of 1987 we were married and in the autumn completed the purchase and moved into the cottage. (That was not as straightforward as it sounds, believe me, but that is another long and entertaining story which I will share with you one day….) By that time we had also started a small plant nursery on the land. Over the intervening thirty three years we raised a family, ran a business, played host to a veritable menagerie of animals: dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, rabbits, guinea pigs, gerbils, chipmunks, hundreds of aviary birds and the occasional rescued wildlife species. Somehow in amongst all that we found time to re wild our field.

As a child, brought up in the green belt suburbia surrounding London, I yearned to live in the countryside.  Annual holidays served to whet my appetite and built up a longing to live in this rural idyll. I always said that I didn’t mind how small my house was as long as it had some land. This proved to be somewhat prophetic as our cottage really was tiny, especially when we became a family of four! Over the past 33 years we have succeeded in re wilding the land. We had no great master plan, the field has evolved and taken shape gradually over the years, with many hedges and mature trees now, some self sewn, others planted by ourselves. We have wildflower areas, ponds and a small bluebell wood. We have been rewarded to see the return of wildlife to our field over the years, including slow worms, grass snakes, dormice, hedgehogs, not to mention eleven species of bats. Everyone who visits us marvels at the birdsong here, it really is beautiful, the place is positively teeming with them. We have no family pets at the moment but still have twelve Soay sheep and care for the occasional rescued wildlife species.

I hope you will join me as the story of our field and its wildlife continues to unfold. I will keep you updated as often as I can with photos and news as we go about our daily life.