It initially proved difficult to concentrate with our twelve week old Jack Russell puppy vying for my attention. But I’m sitting at my desk in the shepherd’s hut at home on a grey November afternoon, Rachel Reeves budget has just been delivered, and I’ve lit the small stove. There was talk of encouraging apprenticeships and helping small business, which is so good to hear. There is something very reassuring to the sound of the crackling fire as it takes, and the tink tink of the expanding metal. It is a small space, a traditionally sized hut that would be familiar to Thomas Hardy were he to walk by. Which he did once, around these parts, as he set scenes from Far From the Madding Crowd in the field beyond the window. Our place is halfway between Farmer Boldwood’s house and Bathsheba’s manor, I’m looking at the field where Gabriel Oak plunged his flock into the sheep wash.
I have recently turned the hut around and landscaped the corner of the old watercress bed into a pond, with an earth bank for the future reintroduction of watervoles. The stable door, were it open, looks out over the pond; a planned project is an oak jetty running from the steps out over the water. But today the door is closed, that’s for another day.
My hut has the small stove traditionally in the corner by the door. It takes only tiny logs; today I have brought a box of suitably sized sweet chestnut offcuts down from the workshop with some kindling. From cold to snug has taken only fifteen minutes, the insulation in the walls holds the heat, the jumper is already off and Clodagh and I are beginning to settle. The atmosphere as ever is one of nurturing shelter. I can hear the wind picking up outside but it’s distant. The desk lamp and the vintage Yew wood desk, the tongue and groove walls in a Farrow and Ball Bancha green and the cream painted shutters all add to the ambience.
There is a single bed platform in this hut, covered in fishing rods and bags for now. But I’m thinking of ordering a new handmade mattress, made to fit a shepherd’s bed as this is a traditionally proportioned hut. The Victorian shepherd would have had a basic pad of stuffed straw or horse hair, but even so I bet he slept well. My mattress is to be really comfortable, as in the most comfortable a mattress could ever be. Organic materials preferably, and neither too firm nor too soft. And I shall order good pillows, and natural bed linen. I look forward to the best sleep ever, that only a den like shepherd’s hut can bring.
It is a space conducive to creativity; as you know our huts are used by artists and writers, by others as a relaxation retreat away from the modern world, or to embrace the modern world with technology and all the mod cons. It’s whatever you want it to be. Today, for me, it is a quiet writing and work space for Clodagh and I. And we are happy.
