Slow Life | 10 January 2009

There were four brothers. They’d just been left their uncle’s farm in his will, a few dozen acres of Leicestershire. It was a fairly standard small-farm package. They’d all grown up with the place, working there through the summers: a red-brick farmhouse, pretty but practically derelict with a mixed bag of cute, lopsided outbuildings — some of these vast in terms of garden sheds or domestic garages but still far too small to be practical for the austere, superhuman scale of modern agriculture. There were a good couple of acres of old-fashioned orchard: apples, pears; a bit of nice pasture; a couple of chunks of woodland with busy streams running into ancient ponds. The majority of the pasture had the telltale undulations of ridge and furrow, indicating that this green and pleasant landscape had been under cultivation since the Middle Ages. And probably not much has changed there since then.