Dreaming of cowsheds

In 1999, Adam Nicolson published a very good book called Perch Hill: A New Life, about his escape from London and a break-down, after his divorce and a nasty mugging, to a farm in the Sussex Weald, close to Kipling’s house, Batemans.

It’s one of the great descriptions of what embedding yourself deep in a patch of the countryside is like, truthful about both its solaces and its frustrations. ‘The Weald has found its Thoreau,’ said Richard Mabey. ‘This is Sussex’s answer to Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence,’ said Alain de Botton. Each according to his own.

As a young man, Nicolson had owned some small, uninhabited islands in the Hebrides given to him by his father Nigel, and he so loved being there, in a wholly natural world, that he has felt ever since ‘essentially shaped by those island times’. They have been his yardstick and touchstone. ‘Is this life, I always ask, as good as that? Does this place measure up to that?’

Having searched England for ‘a place which in its own terms could be an island, an Arcadian simplicity in which crisis and breakdown did not and could not occur’, Nicolson, then in his late thirties, with his second wife Sarah Raven, found Perch Hill Farm and bought it in 1994 for £432,000, won over not by the buildings, ‘a horrible mixture of the improved and the wrecked’, but by its lovely fields, woods and streams, preserved from agricultural destruction by poverty. So for the then price of a handsome London house, he acquired ‘a cramped, dark old farmhouse, a collection of decrepit outbuildings and some fields that would never in a thousand years produce any income worth having.