Cut a window, make a cup of tea and then relax…

Our Shepherd’s Hut is set on the side of a hill in the beautiful Blackdown Hills, but as we worked outside it this weekend, we realised that our woolly hedge had grown up and was blocking the view.  Now, we have a lot of woolly hedges on our farm – which may lead you to think that we’re inclined to laziness in the hedge cutting arena, but read on!  I can confirm that we do cut and lay our hedges, but we also leave quite a lot wild to create natural habitat areas.  But we had a problem, we wanted our glamping guests to be able to enjoy the beautiful view?  So we sat on the shepherd hut steps, pondering matters with a cup of tea.  Then it came to us, we should cut a hedge window – just enough to let the view escape, but not so much that it flattened the hedge, a good solution all round.

So, I took the important role of standing by the hut and directing where the window should be, which obviously involved much gesticulating with my second cup of tea!  Himself was sent up the ladder and under very tricky conditions, he managed to snip and manipulate the wild hedge with all the expertise of a topiarist in training – and the beauty of the rolling Blackdown Hills in front of us slowly emerged.

The great bit about doing jobs that involve the shepherd’s hut is that you always have an excuse to pop the whistling kettle onto the hob – so a celebration cup of tea was declared to be in order, accompanied by a side treat of cupcakes – delicious!

The interesting thing was that as we sat on the steps, admiring the newly-emerged view, cup of tea (me) or coffee (him) in hand, we realised that we had also inadvertently opened up another view – our own… Our pharmacy-no-rx.net farmhouse is lovely, but we tend to rush into it and rush around it, busy family people with lots to do.  As we sat on the steps of the hut, relax half-snoozy from the warm winter sun, we drank in a view that we know and love but very rarely indulge in.  Himself leant sideways and nudged me with his shoulder..”We should do this more often…”, “I know” says I in reply, “but maybe not while we’ve got glamping guests in the hut eh? ;-)”