A thing of beauty

Remember what we found in the derelict shed? Well, I hope Snakey Sid stays away and sticks to the compost heap from now on.
Here is the finished shedy article, with some of the widest oak boards imaginable - so I don't want any of you city types nipping down here to wrench them off for your luxury loft flooring. They are for my turkeys, and the rest of the time for me to contemplate and enjoy.
That just leaves one derelict cow shed to sort and some sad ruined piggeries. Cow shed thinking starts this winter, action next summer.

Round and round we go!

I go away for the day and stuff happens. As I drove off in the morning I passed the scaffolder's lorry and crossed my fingers that they were on the way to the farm. I got back at 10pm and it was too dark to see anything, but this morning I kept the ducks, geese and sheep waiting as I rushed about in curious glee, poking at this and that, finally able to feel all about and inside the roundhouse without having to bend double beneath scaffold planks or get poked in the eye by the poles.
I am completely charmed by it, and want to set up house with a dainty tea set and teddy bears. Or hang a white sheet against the wall and have panoramic cinematic splendour with friends, handing popcorn through the windows (salted through one and sweet sticky toffee through the other). Most of all I want to be entirely naff and hang a huge glitter ball from the roof and bop to Queen and the Stones as the mirrored lights twinkle and spark off the stone. My party palace.

A year in and we're nearly done

Just before my birthday last year the builders arrived. I was psyched up for an 18 month flurry of demolition and rebuild, but I've just had another birthday and the chaps are nearly finished, months ahead of schedule. Just a few days of activity remain. I'm so excited I can hardly believe that the barns are nearly back to where they were decades ago, and looking beautiful.
The last of the scaffolding will disappear this week and then I can post photos of the thatched roundhouse which is tucked behind the threshing barn shown here.
For my birthday, the barns were floodlit so that party guests could ooh and aah as they came down the track, and they did; it was most heart warming. Best of all the nine dovecotes in the cob barn had tealights popped in them, and deep in the cob they were safe from the dramatic winds that howled round and the flames twinkled for five hours. Any birds taking shelter in there will be able to bring up cosy young.

Drunk on apple fumes

68 litres of juice and 145 litres of cider later, I'm ready to fall into a soft sofa in front of the fire. First there was the picking and sorting, then the carrying, the washing, the milling, the pressing, the bottling, the labelling. Not forgetting the sterilising of buckets and bottles and barrels and funnels and the twiddling of bottle brushes of every size and shape to get into those hard to reach corners.
Friends have helped and used the kit all weekend too, so the machines have been worked hard. I suppose 400 litres of juice destined for both alcoholic and breakfast beverage has been churned out in total. Enough to keep us hydrated for quite some while.
The milling and pressing was done in the cob barn...finally it can be put to use.

OOOH, OOH, OOOH, OOOOH!!!

First they made a huge continuous serpent of wheat straw, the eaves wad, to go round the complete perimeter of the roundhouse walls, and now, the bundles or more correctly, yealms, are being put into place. It makes me want to barn dance!

The roundhouse takes shape

Just because I've been busy with sheep doesn't mean that the world of barn restoration has come to a halt. Oh no. The cob barn is likely to be finished today, and yesterday the thatchers started on the roundhouse, putting up battens to take the locally sourced wheat straw. The roundhouse is behind the threshing barn, and touches the road, and so is in full view of the few souls that drive past in their tractors and trucks.
The thatchers will be on site for three or four weeks, and having filled their bellies with blackberry and apple crumble to make sure their boots are leaden and keep them up there, I will report on progress.
It's hard to take shots of the roundhouse as there are few viewing points far enough back to capture its full glory. The photos below show the progress to date, from the demolishing of the ruins to today's grand efforts.

Roof update

More than a month after the clever breathable membrane was put in place, we now have a fully slated roof. The weather has been ghastly and it just ain't safe sliding around up there in the wet. Just two bits of roof left to do now: the stable roof in the same reclaimed slate, just to the left of the photo and attached to the threshing barn; and the round house roof, behind the barn, also attached. The round house will be thatched which is a process I've never really seen up close and personal, so there will be reports and photos. Soon the oak for the huge barn doors will have to be ordered and there will be feverish carpentering, flying sawdust and ringlets of paper thin timber paving the ground and the workshop.

Rain stopped play

Next to the almost completed cob barn is the linhay, an open fronted barn originally used for storing hay. With the barn looking so shiny, the linhay sulked alongside, and worse, had started to drip onto the feed bins stored underneath. It was time to give those lovely granite posts a new hat. One weekend was nearly enough, finishing touches to be sorted today. But rain, of course, intervened. It might be another week, or two, before it's safe to clamber about up there and tap the last sheet and the capping sections into place.

A breathing barn

Weird. After three years I finally have an inkling of what the roofless barn will look like with its hat on. That extraordinarily high tech breathable membrane pinned to the rafters may look oddly modern, but it will be entirely hidden by local reclaimed slate and ensure that moisture doesn't drip onto the floor and that any wet in the building will be able to escape through the roof if it hasn't run out of the doors first.
That's not so daft as it sounds. Yesterday the river below the farm burst its banks spectacularly and caught folk unaware. Fenn swam for the first time, unable to touch the ground as the water reached tall human thigh height on the road. Twenty minutes previously it has been an inch high, but turning to retrace their steps, dog and dog walker communed with the African Queen experience.

Topping out

Well it's happened. The crane arrived two hours late but three hours later all seven trusses were in place, some temporary cross timbers banged in, and the ceremonial oak branches secured at the apex of the threshing barn and the roundhouse. The trusses looked so huge on the ground, but the crane's jib dwarfed everything and they looked no bigger than twiglets or matchsticks as they gently moved through the air. See for yourself.

# 2 roof...

...not second in status like number two wife courtesy of The King and I, but the second to go up, or very nearly. Tomorrow a 35 tonne crane is arriving, for one day. Seven huge oak trusses will be lifted into place, or at least that is the plan. It's been discussed that they will be lifted over the workshop (you can just see it on the right of the photo, door ajar) and NOT over the house, just in case. So here is an image of two of the trusses the night before, and I hope the last time I see them in a horizontal plane.
Chaps came to measure and suck their teeth. Not only does the crane have to put the trusses onto the threshing barn, it needs to lift two of them right over the building for positioning on the newly rebuilt roundhouse walls, which sits right on the road edge. I suspect the odd tractor or two might have to be halted whilst that happens.
Vehicles have been moved, dogs will be kept indoors, and I will click away to capture progress, hard hatted and bug eyed, as I did for roof number one.

Doing it the old way

Today we have our first woman on site, making oak pegs for the roof trusses for the threshing barn.
She starts with blocks of oak, cuts them with a froe into squared sticks, then sitting astride her shaving horse uses her draw knife to round them into the finished article.
After a day off yesterday because of the torrential rain (the river burst its banks at the edge of the farm), the place is now buzzing with activity; I think half the builders in Devon are on site.

Getting there

Staying on the theme of building, I've not shown the progress on the cob barn for ages, and it's nearly finished!
Yes, the doors and windows have to be completed, the remaining downpipes have to go up (or should that be down?), and there is some fiddling around and general tarting up, but on the whole, the major stuff is done.
It has a roof! You can enter without taking your life in your hands. You can stand inside and dream and plan, and admire and chat, and think and pat the dogs, and grin. Lots and lots of grinning.
Those black spaces that are doorways will have doors, those top windows will have shutters, those heaps of sand and timber and stuff will go, and there will be a useful and used space. All those plans will be taken out of the head and put into practice. No more excuse for not getting an in-pig sow, cows, or delaying the breeding of guinea fowl and ducks.
Across the yard, the threshing barn has taken on the scaffold shroud shrugged off by the cob barn. And as a reminder of the sad ruinous state of the cob barn back in July 2007, here's the before shot:

Building

It's been raining, and chilly in the evenings, and more wet is forecast and I've been worried about Hard-Hattie getting cold and torpid. So with a little help (quite a lot of help really), I've made her a snug Hattie House that she can creep into and stay dry and wind-free. It's small scale. It's fit for purpose, and it was completed in a couple of hours.
The photo of the tortoise house was taken up on high, from the top layer of scaffolding now enclosing the threshing barn.
I look at the great works and am rather taken aback by the huge scale of it all. It won't be many weeks before roof trusses are swung into place ready to take the slate. The roundhouse walls that connect to the threshing barn are now complete and its roundiness is also scaffolded inside and out so that the thatcher can work safely once the roof timbers are up. It's all a bit eye-widening at this stage. I'm having to pinch myself.

My best guess.. not for those of a sensitive disposition

I'd said on Friday that I wondered what I'd find the next day...
Well. Here it is. On the huge rotting engine beam that has been taken out of the round house as part of the barn restoration and put in the ram's paddock. The big patch on the right is about six inches high.
First thought: "the ram's been sick".
Second thought (polite version): "the ram has ejaculated".
Third thought: "It could be some sort of fungus?".
I don't think I'm congenitally suited to being an ecologist. Too dirty-minded. Well, it was Saturday morning.

Yodelayheee!

You learn something new every day. Have you ever heard of a Tyrolean flicker gun? Yes? Well it's a first on me. What with the Bernese Mountain Dogs and tools more familiar with lederhosen than American workwear, this is turning into mini Switzerland; all it needs is edelweiss and cuckoo clocks to complete the cliché.
Splat, splat, splat they've gone all day, coating the external cob with lime render, smoothing (not too carefully, the base isn't MDF ) the splats so that the limewash will take.
And there may not be edelweiss, but there are marsh marigolds and wood anemones dangling at the waters edge. But I do have a cowbell hanging from a hook in the kitchen that gets shaken to call the workers in for refreshment.

A big (barn) day

Yesterday was a big day, barn wise. Although there is much to do still on the cob barn, the main roof is now on and looking gorgeous; reclaimed local rag slate and hip and ridge tiles were used, so there is nothing new or shiny about it - it just looks in good shape for an ancient building.
It makes sense to swap effort to the threshing barn to get its roof on too, and then all the joinery and finishing can take place on both barns knowing that the structures are secured and weatherproof. Finishing sounds posher than it is - external lime render and limewash is the sum total of that; these are barns, not holiday homes.
So it was back to demolition mode again, removing the treacherous stone that sat above the huge rotted beam that originally supported the horse engine in the attached roundhouse, and taking down the areas of failed cob. But new cob blocks also went up, so destruction to construction in one day.

An unexpected phone call

The morning round complete, I check emails and start work. The phone rings and an unfamiliar chatty, chilled Totnes voice says she hopes I don't mind, but she's just been googling "cob barns", seen the farm website and wonders if I can help.
She has a friend, a Buddhist monk, who is looking for a cob barn to buy for hosting educational children's workshops. I'm so stunned by this that I don't hear that much of the rest.
Just last week I gave short shrift to a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses who thought they might convert me on my doorstep, but not even I can be rude to a Buddhist monk or their putative friend, even though I was beginning to think "scam". Perhaps I jump to negative conclusions too quickly - actually there is no perhaps about it - but when she mentioned that her monk had charitable funding to buy said barns, the tone was set. Ivana, she said her name was. And yes, the STD she left was indeed a Totnes code.

Five minutes peace

I can't believe how tired I am, and lambing has only started and there are just a couple of dozen ewes to deal with; how friends with 500 manage, I can't even start to imagine. Either way, you're in and out of the lambing shed like some crazed self-winding clockwork toy, checking behaviour, changes in eating patterns, signs of water bags, general atmosphere, and topping up one set of triplets with bottled milk as their first time mum hasn't really got enough of her own. Neither me nor far more experienced farmers I know have ever come across a first-timer having triplets - what was she thinking? Luckily the lambs are evenly sized and full of energy and survival instinct, so no larger bully is benefiting over the others.
Mini and major dramas are enacting themselves all over the place. The first batch of incubated goose eggs are starting to pip, so I am hoping there may be goslings under the heat lamp in a couple of days. One of the geese is sitting on her own full nest, au naturale, as proud and protective as can be. An Aylesbury duck suffered from a prolapse of the oviduct, so she has been dispatched, plucked and is in the freezer, my clean lambing Dickies boilersuit now covered in white down. A ewe gave up trying to lamb after some sterling effort, and intervention brought out one malformed lamb that had blocked the cervix causing another perfectly good lamb to die, leaving the mum with one good healthy ram (this run of triplets is ridiculous - that's three sets so far). Saddest of all, the matriarch, Mrs Longtail, succumbed to pasteurellosis, something the flock had never suffered from until last year when two ewes were also lost to it in the final stages of pregnancy. They are all vaccinated against this lethal pneumonia, have been well fed and are in a well ventilated barn, but you can't avoid the inevitable stress to the body caused by lambing or stop cold windy weather. I'll have to discuss future planning with the vet.
My old cat is getting scrawnier, but still eating, drinking, purring, strolling, mock-hunting, and as you can see, happy to share a bed with Mopsa on a filthy welly-boot dirt strewn kitchen floor. And I am off to check on the ewes, again.

Easter egg hunt

If you look closely, you will see one of the crème eggs from the handfuls poked into various hidey holes in and around the barns for the builders to find, this last morning before their Easter break.
I used to love treasure hunts, the kiddy sort rather than those beloved of suburban families in cars during the seventies and eighties that I remember from summers in North West London.
I left a note stuck on the window of the converted shipping container the builders use as an office, attached to one egg, that said there were nine more to find. There was a chuckling but plaintive response asking whether there were really ten in total. One egg is still sitting untouched in one of the dovecotes. It's really hard not to look at it and give the game away.