Overview of MacPherson’s Covert

This is a schematic plan of the holding.  It is about 6 and a half acres of land including the garden area around the house.  The land more or less gently slopes down between the road and the river and faces east.  This is quite good, since the wind generally comes from the south and west, so we are slightly sheltered from the worst of it.  The soil is shallow and silty.  It has been cultivated in previous years for probably thousands of years, but not in the last 20 or so.  Before we bought it in 2007, it had been used either for grazing or for growing hay.  Apart from the river bank and the garden area it was grazed bare by hungry sheep, the previous owners had been absent for about 18 months and the house was quite damp with no heating (open fires) and leaky roof. We bought it partly because of the location – it just felt like coming home even the first time we came over the brae into Glendale.  There were also several outbuildings – a concrete walled byre (in poor condition), a ‘tractor shed’ which we call the workshop which was damp but sound, a pigpen style corrugated barn (full of sheep poo and straw!) and a large polytunnel.  We have gradually evicted the sheep and planted trees over the majority of the land.  The gully field near the house has been left almost to revert to nature, and a large area above the viewpoint (sometimes called ‘the mound’) is hopefully going to be another pond area.