In 2002/3 dad built a new sheep shed to increase the cattle-tending area during lambing.  Here he has just finished putting the roof on.

I sometimes help move sheep around to get them treated and sheared, though the eartags and injections alarm me slightly.  In the foreground

is the old pigs-sty.  My grandpa kept pigs there but now it is a biomass heat source for the lambing ewes using plant waste from the garden.

This is the garden taken from the top of the mill.  It was shockingly new here and people would come in large numbers every week in the summer,

often several times a week.  I was finding it hard to distance myself from my duties to my parents, as they were always asking me to help, but I

had no income with which to support myself there, and was finding myself torn to the wind with my own work.

This is me with the house cat, Penny. She doesn't look too comfortable here because she had just moved from London (my brother) and wasn't

sure of use, then.  This is taken in the tea room where the wisteria grows and it is in it's final flowering of the year here, 2006.

It rains so much around here and we only have one tractor and narrow lanes.  When the hay is baled Dad stacks it like this when it is large-bale.

He needs a staging-post before the winter storage area underneath the beam in the mill.  I often help cover it with thick black polythene.  Here it is

uncovered.

...... and here it is covered a few minutes later.  Up until 2008 we made small bale hay, which meant I was wandering the fields and trying not to

get spotted ("working") when I wasn't under contract.  I would often where a wide-brimmed hat  and sunglasses to avoid being recognised.  One

year I suggested to dad I wear a false moustache.  The rain meant dad needed help stacking trailers as the window for getting it in is often small.

We firstly, stacked the bales in 5-8 number then the wim-wam machine grabs the bales and they go on the trailer, or sometimes straight to the barn if

they are close-to.  The trailers were put above the old cowshed or mostly into the left-hand side of the mill with the elevator.  The elevator means

I would have to unstack the trailer from the top down, having undone all the transport ropes.  As dad tore his Achilles tendon this year it all went

to big bale, also because the weather wasn't sunny enough for much hay and what was left was silage.  Putting the hay in the mill was good for

security, but it was a horrible job to stack the hay in there as it was dusty and in a confined space, the doorway isn't very big and with the elevator

in there as well getting down the ladder can be scary.  Ladders scare me silly at times.  My sister got dad a ladder-mate for xmas and it does a good

job of getting a ladder against a wall with a gutter on.  The flat roof above my garage was leaking onto the wooden floor in my room below and

things were looking like falling through so I went up on the roof with a sealant gun.  Getting off the ladder was okay but getting on was one of those

things that I don't like when you have to do what free-climbers call a "dyno" a dynamic move when error can result in death, which once entered into

cannot be stopped past the halfway point.