There has probably been a farm at the site of Belle Grove for hundreds of years. Nick’s family took over the farm and  the  late Victorian brick and tile farmhouse in the early 1960′s. The house was demolished in 2007  (see early entries under House Progress) and in the process, we came across a number of Tudor bricks that had been stuffed in the chimney as infill and can only speculate that these were taken from an earlier building on the site. ‘Belle Grove’ is identified on the 1926 OS map but there is little clue as to why it has this not-very-Suffolk name.

Back in the 60′s, the farm was mixed, the family keeping a dairy herd but they later converted to fully arable (wheat and sugar beet). There was insufficent work on the farm to keep Nick gainfully occupied around the year as well as his father, so  he diversified into running long haul Trans Africa overland expeditions (5+ months overland to East and South Africa). Jo met him when she booked on the 1974 departure and the rest is history, as they say.

Nick & Jo ran African trips in one form and another (as Hobo Trans Africa and, later, Truck Africa)  for the best part of 30 years and the farm outbuildings came in very useful for storing equipment and building the expedition vehicles virtually from scratch.

In the early days we were away half the year on the trips; later we employed crew. However the time came when we’d had enough and wondered how the outbuildings could be used to earn their keep.

That is when we came up with the idea of holiday lets. We looked into Defra rural grants but these were so hedged about with conditions and bureaucracy that we went ahead under our own steam. It was an ambitious project financed by mortgaging our existing house in Halesworth. The very first thing to do though, was to get planning permission to erect a huge modern shed in which to store all the ‘junk’ and equipment from the old buildings, to be sorted out at a later stage…

Only then could they be cleared. Planning permission for the conversions followed and work commenced, aided by a tiny but willing Polish workforce. (It couldn’t have been done without them).

Another early decision was to excavate two large  ponds to give the landscape  added interest and to encourage wildlife. This did rather give the place  the look of the Somme for a couple of years but one of the delightful aspects of the development has been the way the ponds  have gradually filled with rainwater and the banks colonised  by teasels and grasses, the  margins by reeds and bulrushes and the water itself by all sorts of creatures including water voles, newts and water boatmen. (We haven’t added fish as we wanted to see what would happen if we allowed the ponds to acquire their own life forms as part of a natural process).

before:

after:

The outbuildings were of little architectural merit. Ironically, the brickwork on some was relatively new. This is because they were hit by a stray bomb during WW2 (there were a lot of airfields around East Anglia which were targeted, including the USAAF base at nearby Holton) and, apparently, the only way to qualify for government reparations was to rebuild exactly what had been on the site. In other words, Victorian outbuildings designed for horses and carts and therefore already redundant, had to be rebuilt as such!  The bricks were bound by cement as opposed to the older lime mortar and were utilitarian rather than attractive, which is why we ended up using quite a lot of oak cladding.

The clearance of decades worth of farm machinery, tools, rubber tyres, trans-africa equipment and goodness knows what, took months. Then we could stand back and see what we’d got -  which wasn’t very exciting to be honest.  This is where Nick’s skill at finding the perfect use for reclaimed timbers and other materials came in - almost all of what you see inside and out is not original to the buildings.

Where to start?!