Originally published February 2022.

Seemingly unused space can be receptacles of history.

In the middle of our farmyard sits an empty barn. The footprint is bigger than that of a village church, with chalk block work and the thick flint and brick walls dating back more than 260 years. A Czech refugee, Bruno Pogodin, during the Second World War, inscribed his name into the chalk, mournfully remarking, “They send me to my death”, when repatriated at the war’s end. Timbers in the roof once formed part of an even older building which was robbed, or dismantled, to make this one. That older building might explain the enigma of the nearby field, called The Barn Field, in which no building in living memory has stood, but no one really knows.

Our barn has not always been empty, either. It has homed a parade of agricultural change. Cart horses and race horses have lived there, tethered dairy cows milked and piglets fattened. Crops of wheat and stacks of hay sat inside its protection. More recently, well, only 50 years ago, lambing ewes interspersed with the building of a sailing boat by my father-in-law, listening to Ipi Tombi while high on the fumes of chandler’s glue. Aptly named Endymion, the boat’s name comes from a shepherd king who romanced a moon goddess. The owl who sometimes lives there sits on several of myriad ledges, has ancestors that saw much while also keeping the rats at bay, and relatives named after Athena, the goddess of wisdom.