The Journey

Funny how things don't always work out as we plan... and often work out better than we'd imagined!

Our initial idea was to buy a house in the country with some land so we could live with our horses... well, maybe several horses... and we'd like to keep them "naturally" so that meant we needed more land than most equestrian facilities had with them... and no stables...

So we started looking at farms.  We saw some that Mark liked but Lorraine didn't, and (you guessed it) some that Lorraine liked but Mark didn't.  Then we saw Vowley Farm, 110 acres of grassland just off the M4, Junction 16 in rural Wiltshire.  As we drove away after our first viewing we looked at each other and said, "that might work".  It wasn't quite what we'd had in mind.  The land is heavy clay and very flat.  The house is brand new and we'd been into old renovation jobs.  And it has an agricultural occupancy condition - which means farming is the name of the game, not horses.

Perhaps we could farm... but what?  We had several conversations with the resident farmer about raising beef cows.  The theory of which is all very well, and we like a bit of beef every now and then, but what about raising animals then sending them off for slaughter?  Could we do that?  We grappled with many moral, emotional and theoretical dilemmas around this subject, but suffice it to say that we ended up nearly a year later signing the papers, buying some of the cows and moving in as farmers Stanton to embark on an adventure that has taken us to the edge of ourselves and beyond and continues to be breathtaking.