Yesterday we left home at 6 am to drive to Pyeworthy in North Devon.  On the way we stopped at our old home, The Old Forge, which is a thatched cottage just outside the village of Sandford 10 miles north of Exeter.  This is where our son was raised until he was 2 and where we started to learn our “country” skills – growing vegetables, making jam, milking goats, raising jersey cows and keeping chickens and ducks and sheep and even spinning the wool.  As I mentioned on Sunday morning, before we left The Gables, I had been anxious to secure the fences around the lamb paddock as our experience in Devon taught us that Jacob sheep can easily jump low hedges and find gaps in fences over which to leap.  The neighbouring farm to the our fields at The Old Forge were blessed with some black and white lambs when our Jacob ram jumped over the thick hedge to get to the attractive white ewes in Farmer Isaacs’ field.  That was 35 years ago.  Mrs Isaacs, the farmer’s wife, died young and Farmer Isaacs only recently passed away in his 90’s.  His explanation of his longevity (according to an old friend and neighbour) was that he never visited a dentist!  Interesting theory.   I digress. After stopping at our old house, peeking at the garden and admiring their improvements to our ramshackle old barns and the house itself, we started on the road back up the hill.  I pointed to the Isaacs farm and asked my daughter to take a photo of some white sheep grazing in the field.  At that moment a car emerged from the farm entrance and a man in overalls and floppy hat got out of the car.

We explained who we were and asked if by any chance he knew Farmer Isaacs.  He told us that he was one of his two sons (we had known them as young men when we lived there) and that he now ran the farm.  I was glad to hear that the farm had passed from father to son and that he continued to raise sheep on the hillside.  Below is a photograph of the Old Forge where the late Mrs Isaacs grew up and lived before she married Farmer Peter Isaacs and moved just up the hill.  It really had been a blacksmiths shop and her father  shod the local horses until he retired.  That became our home for four years and we loved it and its history.

We drove further north via Hatherleigh and Holsworthy, both small towns which held weekly livestock markets and where we enjoyed watching the auctions and the country folk coming to meet each other for a regular catch up on news both family and farming some forty years ago.

At last we reached the village of Pyeworthy where the wedding was to be held in the restored rectory which is not only a splendid house but has several acres of land around the property, a swimming pool, a walled vegetable garden, a wooden greenhouse of large proportions and a restored barn similar to our own.  Jeremy and I had visited Pyeworthy 35 years before when we lived at The Old Forge.  Let me explain.  My dear Dutch friend Malko Peters and I trained as physiotherapists in London.  After qualifying she and a friend moved to live and work in North Devon and I moved to mid Devon to live at The Old Forge. Malko’s sister and her husband had just bought a run down rectory and were hoping, in time, to rebuild the walled garden and improve the house and outbuildings.  This is the very same Pyeworthy rectory that Jeremy’s niece found, by chance, on the internet as the place in which she could marry and hold a party for friends and family from near and far.  The Rectory is still owned and run by Malko’s sister and husband and I had not seen them since we last met in very sad circumstances nearly 14 years ago in Wassenaar, Netherlands.  Jeremy and I had travelled to Holland to visit Malko who knew that she was dying from terminal cancer and her lovely sister, Plym and husband Tony, were staying with her to nurse her and ease her through the last very difficult days.  We spent a special afternoon sitting around a tea table in Malko’s garden talking about life and philosophy, and even angels and taking photographs that I managed to send her before the cancer took her sight from her.  So it was poignant and bittersweet to meet Plym and Tony again in the beautiful surroundings of Pyeworthy on the happy occasion of a wedding .  Even more so as Plym has erected a statue of Malko in the garden – a representation of the girl who had, in her youth,  been a very talented and classically trained ballet dancer. Jeremy took our photograph next to the statue of Malko and we shared memories of her sister and my friend on a beautifully sunny Devon day as we toasted the future of Mollie and Louis.