Coombe Barn, Wembury, Devon

Before we can start work on the main barn which will house our living area, we have to “mitigate” the bats. As many will know, bats are a European Protected Species and in 2008, when the ecological survey was done, two lesser horshoe bats were observed roosting in the barn. Pity there are no photographs, but apparently bats do not like bright lights or flashes, which drive them away.

We are quite happy to deal with them, but it seems a new survey this summer will be necessary and then a mitigation scheme put to Natural England.

What we are proposing is to dedicate about half of the roofspace of our “Little Barn” as a bat loft.

Lesser horseshoe bats unlike brown long eared bats like to enter and fly around before settling, requiring a space of between 2 – 2.8m high and 4-5m wide. The Little Barn should be able to accomodate this relatively easy.

We couldn’t resist buying a mini dumper/muck truck at a local auction. Quite easy to manoeuvre forwards and backwards but not very good on turning, which should be fun when it’s full of heavy stones!

Having decided to purchase a mini digger from a friend in Surrey, there was the slightly complicated task of getting it back to Devon. Firstly, it took 2 hours to load onto our trailer (by Pete who is an experienced digger driver), thankfully we didn’t have to load it on our own).

Fortunately, the journey to Devon went very smoothly but we were a bit apprehensive of the impending task of unloading it, neither of us having operated a digger before. As the digger had been loaded on the trailer backwards and the cab rotated to face the car so the arm wasn’t hanging over the back of the trailer, we were going to have to rotate the cab back the right way round before unloading, which sounds relatively easy, but the digger had to be raised slightly to clear the sides of the trailer first

Doug made it look so easy…he’s a natural!

Rachel was itching to have a go too…

New career maybe?

At last we are able to do something – Dennis (the digger) arrives to clear the remains and rubbish of the cubicle barn behind the Milking Parlour (South Barn) so we will be able to put temporary secure storage on site.

Although “The Great Barn” was sold, there was another barn at the same farm.  On the 21st January, it was getting dark when we arrived at Coombe Farm to see Coombe Barn. 

 

 Now we had to weigh up the pros and cons between the Mill and Coombe Barn and Coombe Barn won! We made an offer.

Then Rachel saw this barn in Wembury, but when we asked about it, we found it was sold subject to contract 🙁

Sadly the barn we saw was already under offer, so we looked around and saw this mill:

Rachel was browsing the internet looking at barns to convert.

She saw this one for £37K…

…and this one for 74k€

But then Doug read the book “Bon Courage” by Richard Wiles and we realised that converting an historic barn in France might not be so easy.