'The house was smallish and gaunt if not downright ugly, rendered and whitewashed, and comprised an entrance porch, 30' kitchen with Rayburn, a front room or parlour with a striking Inglenook fireplace which would take a small tree, and upstairs two bedrooms, a wide landing and bathroom. Water came by gravity from a spring fed tank in the bank behind.

The house, facing north, looked directly onto the yard, with a modernish 6 tie cowshed adjoining, the yard itself of undressed shale flanked on either side by two traditional asbestos or corrugated iron roofed sheds, completely gutted, one having a concrete apron, the other not. All very basic. Behind the buildings on one side was a 2000 bale Dutch hay barn, and on the other a 50' corrugated 'silo' and a sheep dip.

Approach to the farm was a tarmaced lane with a 1:6 pitch up from the main Talley - Pumpsaint Road, then an undressed track cut into the face of next doors bank, over a cattle grid and down a slope to the yard, continuing along to a smallholding which might once have been a foreman's house. when I took over I think there were 5 working gates and an awful lot of gateways in the ragged hedgerows: it came very close to free range and anyone who has to do it with sheep will know what that can mean'.