Set in stone

This former working farm in the Cotswolds with its scattering of ancient buildings has been transformed into a series of beautiful gardens surrounding the main house

- Tiffany Daneff

MANY of the hamlets and small villages that follow the River Windrush as it meanders through the western end of the Cotswolds lie in the dark shadow of steeply wooded slopes, until, eventually, the land rises to an escarpment that opens out offering fine views to the south. This is an area of estates and farms that date back to the early medieval period, a landscape marked out in honeyed stone walls and grazing sheep. It is here that, since 2012, the designer Graham Lloyd-Brunt has been helping the owners of what had once been a large working farm with many ancient outbuildings and barns to make a garden.

When the owners moved here in 1999, the farm came with significantly less land than the 40 acres it now encompasses. Over the years, however, they acquired further fields and woods, as well as several Cotswold stone outbuildings, notably a handsome long barn, a derelict old forge and a dilapidated stone cart shed in front of the farmhouse. All are spread out in what feels like no particular order down a steep slope, so that, from the road, only the mossed slate roofs are visible.

In the early years, much essential repair and maintenance was done throughout the site with the help of local dry-stone wallers and craftsmen. They secured a rat run of existing walls and created terraces that sloped from the top of the slope—encompassing a small productive garden now doubled in size—down to the farmhouse, where more recent work has created a small gravelled courtyard neatly walled and capped.