‘You sound as though you’re trying to put me off.’ Goodwin chuckled. ‘You know, some people told us once that, when we move to the country, we’ll have to keep quiet for at least five years. Don’t go poking your nose in, they said. No organizing things, or making changes. It’s considered interfering. You’re an outsider and you have to serve an apprenticeship, until you’re accepted.’

‘And I suppose you don’t think that will apply to you?’ said Fry. ‘Well, Mr Goodwin, you don’t know the half of it.’

Cooper was discovering that there could be a whole social history buried in farm records. It was possible to trace the changes that had taken place in farming over the decades through the day-today details of income and expenditure.

For example, until the 1980s, government grant schemes had been committed only to increasing food production, which meant they often supported plans to improve rough pasture or increase grazing levels, which damaged conservation interests. But for some years now, grants had been moving towards environmentally friendly land management and biodiversity. There was the Countryside Stewardship Scheme of the early 1990s. Then the reform of CAP and environmental stewardship, encouraging farmers to manage land in a way that enhanced the landscape and conserved wildlife.

Somehow, though, the Suttons and Pity Wood Farm had fallen between two stools. It seemed as though they’d been too slow to change. Perhaps they’d been confused by the conflicting pressures, baffled by the fact that practices encouraged in their younger days were now considered almost criminal. Their farm records showed that their attempts at diversification had been half-hearted at best, and misguided at worst.

Cooper felt a twinge of sympathy for them. The Suttons weren’t alone in failing to grasp that conservation was now more important than the production of food.

There was an irony in the pattern the Suttons had followed. By the mid-1990s, the brothers could have got a decent price for Pity Wood Farm, if they’d decided to sell. But, like so many farmers, they probably thought they could get through the bad times and things would improve.

So they’d missed their chance to capitalize on the myth of the countryside idyll, which had been widespread in the 1990s. Living in the countryside had become the city dweller’s dream. Features in the Sunday supplements suggested the countryside could provide the space to be yourself, to have the freedom to live your life without close neighbours, busy roads, the daily struggle to get to work. Nobody spoke of the downsides – the isolation, inadequate services, having to walk a mile to the nearest bus stop, if there were any buses. No one pointed out that within a few years there’d be no shops or hospitals, nor even a post office.