The equinox has been and gone, and for over nine hundred years that’s meant one thing in this valley: get the harvest in.
Last week was the autumn equinox, when day and night are the same length and the year starts tipping towards winter. Here, we mostly noticed it because the evenings are drawing in and the alpacas have started queueing at the gate for their tea a little earlier than they did in August.
But for almost everyone who has ever lived in this valley, and people have been farming here for well over nine hundred years, this week meant something far more pressing. The harvest had to be in. The apples wanted pressing. The animals needed bringing closer to home before the weather turned.
So, we thought we’d take a walk back through a few of those autumns.
1086: six households and fifteen goats
When William the Conqueror sent his clerks out across England to write down who owned what, they came to a small settlement in this corner of Cornwall called Lanwarnick. And what they wrote down is wonderfully specific.
There were six households, five pigs, fifteen sheep and fifteen goats, plus enough land for two ploughs, sixty acres of pasture and ten of woodland.
Fifteen goats. We have six pygmy goats today, and they cause more than enough trouble, so heaven knows what fifteen of them got up to in 1086.
The lord of the manor was a man called Alric, and this is the bit we love. He held Lanwarnick before the Norman Conquest, and twenty years later he was still holding it, now under Count Robert of Mortain, William’s half-brother. Most English landowners lost everything after 1066. Alric kept his valley. We like to think it was simply too far down a Cornish lane for anyone to come and take it off him.
The clerks also noted that the land had dropped in value, from a pound to eight shillings. We’re trying not to take that personally.
The 1600s: a house with a clay oven
The first part of our Old Farmhouse was built in the 1600s, and it’s been at the heart of the farm ever since. Its best feature is in what’s now the dining room: a cloam oven, set into the wall beside the old open fire.
Cloam is an old West Country word for earthenware, and these ovens were exactly that, a clay dome built into the thickness of the wall. You didn’t light a fire underneath. You lit it inside the oven itself, with furze or brushwood, and left it until the clay was glowing hot. Then you raked out the ashes, slid in the bread, sealed the door and let the heat do the rest.
At this time of year, that bread would have been made from wheat grown right here on the farm. We can’t quite promise the same experience, but the oven’s still there, and so is the fire, and the bread is still made just down the road.
The 1690s: a painted map
By the end of that century the manor of Lanwarnick belonged to the Robartes family of Lanhydrock just a few miles away, the same grand house you can visit today. In the 1690s they commissioned a remarkable set of hand-painted maps of their lands across Cornwall, with the fields named and measured.
Lanwarnick is in there. One of the maps shows the Barton of Lanwarnick, a barton being the old West Country name for the main farm of a manor. The maps still survive, and we’re hoping to track ours down, because we’d dearly love to know what our fields were called three hundred years ago.
And for tenants on estates like this one, the end of September had another meaning altogether. Michaelmas, on the 29th, was traditionally rent day. So after all that harvesting, the first thing to do with the proceeds was hand them over. Some things never change.
Harvest in the yard
Walk around the yard today, and you can still read the old farming year in the buildings.
Spice Barn’s high ceilings were built to store the grain once it was in, and later the tractors that did the work. Hob Nob was home to the cider press, and right about now it would have been the busiest place on the farm, with the apples brought in, crushed and pressed, and the juice run off into barrels to work away through the winter. Rainbow Cottage was the stables, where the working horses came home to rest after the heaviest weeks of their year.
And now
The last farming family moved on in the 2000s, and the barns and stables became the cottages you know today. But a farm has a way of staying a farm.
The harvest just looks a little different now. It’s alpaca fleece from this summer’s shearing, honey from our own bees, eggs from the rescue chickens, and logs from our own woodland stacked up for your wood burners. There are goats in the fields again. And, just as it has been for over nine hundred autumns, this is when the next farming year begins. The alpaca girls are being mated right now, so next summer’s cria are already on their way.
So, if you’re here this autumn, sitting by the fire in the Old Farmhouse with the old bread oven beside you, spare a thought for Alric, his fifteen goats, and everyone who has brought in the harvest here since. Then pour yourself a glass of something local and put your feet up. They’d have wanted you to.
Come and stay this autumn, and see the history and the harvest for yourself.
