My Place

I live in a converted railway station built in the 1850s and shut down a hundred years later.  The trains still run past quite frequently, but no longer stop in our back yard.


This page is dedicated to telling you what a cool place my house is, and how we converted it from a pigsty (literally) to a... habitable pigsty. 

Other links in this section:

The Shack	Me, my dad and my brother built ourselves a wooden shack in the garden.  Read about how we did it and see some photos here
Boat building	We've made lots of plywood canoes, and we offer canoe building weekends if you're interested.  This is my dad's site, which goes into much more detail than me.  Here is a video of my river from the canoe (25Mb wmv)

The house

We bought the house in 1995.  I was 10, my brother Rob was 8, and my sister Anna was 11.  We 'finished' in the summer of 1998, just after my little brother Tom came along. 

We plumbed in a central heating and hot water system from scratch, and built a sleeping platform in the old tool-sharpening room which was to become mine and Rob's bedroom.  He uses the platform for all his junk, and I sleep underneath.  My bed fills the space beneath, but I have occasionally had a hammock slung diagonally across the bed.  

We created a corridor which runs down the railway side of the house from the kitchen/living room area to the utility room at the end.  This screens most of the noise from the bedrooms, although we got used to the noise of the trains quickly so they no longer disturb us (except when they come past during a phone call). 

Flora and Fauna

When we first started working on the place, we got a hundred tonnes of topsoil delivered from the diggings of a nearby artificial lake.  Most of the land was wasteground, and we had a whole load of rubble carted away, and then we laid the soil down over the most accesible parts and planted loads of fruit trees and vegetable plots before the weeds had time to take over. 

We won a whole load of prizes in the local vegetable shows for a few years, but eventually had to settle for grass and a fierce minority of nettles and thistles.  In later years we bought some sheep to keep it under control after wearing out numerous lawn mowers (the people, not the machines).  Now we still have fruit trees, but have more or less given up on vegetables.  Sheep are fairly impartial when it comes to diverse vegetation. 

I kept chickens for a while, and once went through the affluent state of having more eggs than we needed and selling extras outside the gate, but it didn't last.  We've got a few chickens now, and Tom occasionally rears ducks from eggs.

And of course, my dog, Jake, who I got from a rescue centre in the summer of 2004.  He is a black 7 year old labrador-collie cross who accompanies me on my early morning rambles by the river.  He annoys the sheep and gets chased by the cockerel, but goes mad at the canoes.  

The river

Our garden backs onto the river which is 8 to 10 yards wide and just over waist height at our landing stage.  It's perfect for swimming during the summer, and we have built lots of plywood canoes ourselves, as well as using a large canadian canoe lent by a local priest.  We can go up the river about 2 miles as the kingfisher flies (and there are a couple nesting on our land), and down the river quite a long way as well.  As for wildlife, we often see grass-snakes and the occasional adder, plenty of swans and ducks, a water rat, and, a few years back, I spotted a mink climbing out of the water with a young grass-snake in its mouth, and eat it in front of me.  Plenty of fish, too. 

More about our canoes, and Canoe Building Weekends

Video of river from the canoe (25Mb wmv)

How we built our shack

When I get the chance, I might scan in a few of the many photos we have of the renovation process.  Look forward to pictures of dusty people in paint-spattered clothes wielding hammers and drills, and generally having a whale of a time.