Letters from Hillside
IT was November nine years ago and the very end of a growing season when we took possession of Hillside. It was a good time to witness a landscape stripping itself back to reveal its bare bones.
The 20-acre smallholding originally produced fruit and vegetables for the nearby town of Bath, but the farmer before us had turned the ground over to beef cattle in the 1980s and grazed it hard to the hedges. He famously said ‘You can’t live off the view!’, but that view is one of the very reasons we are here. Perched and exposed on the south-facing slopes, our prospect is remarkable. We look west up the valley, where the stark line of Freezing Hill is picked out in a procession of beech trees. The prevailing wind whips up and over
