Four generations, one patch of Essex

The farm has been worked by the same family since before the war. The combine still goes out every August and the contracting keeps the yard busy through the winter.

Goldstones sits on the Radwinter Road out of Ashdon, a few miles from Saffron Walden. It is arable ground mostly — wheat, barley, some beans — on the heavy clay that makes up this corner of north Essex. The farmhouse is the old brick one with the tall chimney; the curved-roofed range beyond it was a Dutch barn until 2019.

Why we opened the gate

Diversifying was not a rebrand. The barns were standing empty, the old gravel pits had filled with water, and people kept asking whether they could fish them. So we tidied the barns, stocked the lakes, and started selling the logs we were already cutting out of the hedgerows.

None of it was a plan. All of it pays for the bits of farming that do not.

• The barns were converted in 2019 and let year round
• The two lakes were dug from old gravel workings and hold 23 pegs between them
• Logs come from our own hedgerow and woodland thinnings
• The shoot runs under its own name, GSG Shoots

“We're not a visitor attraction. We're a farm that lets people in.”

The year on the farm

Spring is drilling and lambing next door. Summer is topping, baling and the lakes at their busiest. August is harvest and nobody sees anybody. Autumn is the log round and the shoot. Winter is hedges, ditches and machinery in bits on the workshop floor.

If you come in August, expect dust and a combine in the way. That is the farm working, not the farm being untidy.