It was an unlikely step for Cat Earp to leave her job at Gucci and her home in London to move into her husband’s family farmhouse in Devon, miles from a train station, and accessible only with stout boots rather than double G-branded loafers. “Running a farm wasn’t really part of my life plan,” she admits.
But her husband Ant, who had grown up on the 400-acre farm, says he had always been drawn back. “If my parents went away on holiday, when I was 16, I’d be the one volunteering to stay behind and look after the cows,” he says. “When I was at university and later working, any time off, I’d come back and work on the farm. I just didn’t want to be anywhere else.”
He met Cat while working briefly in London in 2014, before moving home to work with his father. Cat moved down part-time after they were married in 2016 and full-time after having her first baby in 2017. “Everyone was so surprised; but I was quite swept away by everything that was happening,” she says. “It was only when I was stuck on a farm in deepest darkest Dorset with a tiny baby, living in Ant’s granny’s old bungalow and not knowing a soul, that I started to think ‘yikes, what on earth have I done?’”
That was part one. Last month, the Earps, along with their two children, aged six and four, moved into the main, 370-year-old farmhouse, complete with thatched roof, that hadn’t been modernised much since Ant’s parents, Jenny and Willie Earp, bought it 40 years ago. Already, it’s had a considerable overhaul. The old playroom is now a big, open-plan kitchen, with a log burner and big doors that open out on to the garden; the former kitchen is now the couple’s office, while upstairs has been totally redecorated. Meanwhile, Ant’s parents have built themselves a modern house on the farm.
The Earps are one of a number of people who’ve gone back to an old family farm or estate to try to make a go of it. While it might seem a charming life, the duty to take on their parents’ land and houses, coupled with the realities of country living, make it quite a challenge.
Moving into a childhood home, particularly a large one in the countryside, comes with a unique set of anxieties. There are succession planning and inheritance concerns when siblings are involved. “It would have been so much easier to divide things between the three of [my children] by selling up,” says Jenny Earp, “but we feel so lucky that we are able to carry on living on the farm.”
There is a strange confluence of feelings, particularly within a couple. For Ant, being back in the house he grew up in was at first discombobulating. “I sometimes still feel like a child, but then I look down and I see my two children.” For Cat, “it was a very weird life experience to move into your parents-in-law’s home”.
And then there are the money worries that a large house, particularly with a farm business attached, creates. Cat says she’s had “sleepless nights” about the money involved with moving into a large home, and the financial uncertainty of the farm is an acute worry for Ant.
He now runs the farm side by side with his father (“I don’t think he’ll ever give up totally, he loves being out on the tractor, and it’s very useful to have him around”). Six years ago, he sold the beef cattle and turned the farm into an arable one, growing cereal including wheat and maize. “The cows took up an awful lot of time, we can now rent that grass out and have the space and time for other business ventures.”
With Brexit came an end to EU farming subsidies, replaced by government-backed sustainable farming incentives (SFI). Some farmers are extremely unhappy with the new scheme, with 100 tractors driving to Westminster last month in a protest against what farmers consider a lack of support for UK food production.
Ant is trying to be pragmatic about the new subsidies. “I’ve thrown myself headfirst into them, doing things like planting wild flowers to encourage wildlife and creating buffer strips on the land, but we don’t entirely know the full extent of what the [SFI] will entail — [the measures] are being drip fed to us,” Ant says.
“We’re basically having to work a lot harder for the money, and everything is very tight.” Added to this, the weather this winter has meant “we’re very behind on everything, it’s just been too wet to get out there”.
Diversifying the business has become a necessity. “The future is very uncertain, so we’re trying to look at different angles,” he says. “I want income in from lots of different streams to protect us and the farm. It’s a huge responsibility taking it on.”
One of those income streams is a hospitality business, Aller Dorset, which they opened in 2021, offering accommodation in two high-spec Plankbridge shepherd’s huts (each costing £55,000). “I love hosting friends, it’s something I really enjoy, so I knew I could throw my energy into it,” Cat says.
For the first year, the business had 100 per cent occupancy and a waiting list of up to 80 people. With the help of a bank loan, which they repaid over the year, they added two new, bigger huts with outside baths that have been much photographed on Instagram. Occupancy has declined since the post-lockdown boom in domestic holidays, but is still at 70 per cent.
“We budget for 50 per cent occupancy, so we’re still over,” she says. They haven’t yet closed over winter. “It’s full every weekend, which is exhausting, as you’re always on,” she says. Last Sunday, for example, Ant got a call at 8pm to say a festoon light had broken — so he had to put on his boots and drive over. “It would be nice to have a night you can guarantee in front of the telly,” she says.
Olive and Hugo Guest have a similar story. They met at university and moved to London. But early on, Hugo dreamt of moving home to the rambling late-Georgian Devon manor he grew up in.
“I began to question my career as an insurance broker,” Hugo says, “and the prospect of spending my entire career in London was daunting.” Eight years ago, he retrained as a chef, working in kitchens including at The Marksman and Sorella in London. “I had a dual plan: plan A involved transforming the family home into a guest house and restaurant; and plan B was to sustain a livelihood as a chef, regardless.”
Olive, however, had hesitations about moving in with her in-laws. “I had my life in London, I loved my job. But then we started a family and suddenly the crazy hours of advertising didn’t fit, and I wanted a different kind of life for my children.”
The catalyst was when Hugo’s parents said they were contemplating selling Glebe House. The couple moved down in spring 2020. Even at that stage, it wasn’t quite meant to be permanent, but lockdown struck, and they stayed. “There was no big saying goodbye to London,” Hugo says, “but it felt very natural to be home.”
In September 2020, they brought in builders and spent six months gutting the house, redecorating in a bold style, with salmon-pink living room walls, a yellow-panelled kitchen and lots of Olive’s own oil paintings on the walls. “I was nervous about coming in and changing everything up,” Olive says. “It’s been Hugo and his brothers’ home all their lives. We’ve kept lots of art and ceramics and things like the tiles retain a nod to its history.”
The guest house opened in 2021 and was fully booked for the first year, staying above 90 per cent capacity ever since. Likewise, the restaurant is full almost every night.
Hugo had already applied for a €150,000 grant from the European Union in 2019, before they moved down. “I did it on the sly, I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but I needed to see if we could afford to do what we wanted.” The couple put the money towards building a bakery, developing the land and bringing in more staff.
“This type of business requires a lot of people physically on the ground for it to run smoothly and for us to provide the level of service we need to,” Hugo says. The knock-on effect is that “our wage bill has increased significantly the past few years”, but he says the business is still making a profit.
The plan for the next year is physical expansion, both for the business and the family. They are also building a new home for themselves and their two young boys in the grounds. “I’ve made my peace with being on call all the time, but I’m really craving a space of our own to go back to after a hard day,” he says.
For Jay Goddard, the return home was more pre-determined. She grew up in the 16th-century family estate, Borde Hill in West Sussex. The house was built in 1598 by the grandson of Henry VIII’s private herbalist and physician and has been owned by Goddard’s family — the Stephenson Clarkes — for the past 130 years. She moved in as a six-year-old after her grandfather died and her father took over the running of the estate.
She had been living with her husband Alex in Hackney, east London, working as a marketing executive for global brands including Nike and Apple. She says it was the birth of her children that focused her attention homeward. “I’d always had a close affinity to Borde Hill, but motherhood was a real catalyst for change,” she says. “It made me think more about the environment I wanted to bring my children up in, and the kind of life we wanted to lead. But I also felt that it was important to give my parents the opportunity to retire. They’ve dedicated the past 40 years of their lives to running Borde Hill, and it’s time for me, as the eldest child, to step up.”
When she moved home in July 2023 — with her parents moving to a farmhouse down the road — she became the fifth family custodian, and the first woman, in charge of the estate. In pleasing symmetry, her sons Alfie and Jago were four and six: the same ages as her and her brother when they moved in. “I remember a real sense of freedom growing up here, of playing in the woods with my brother, and I love that my boys have that now, too.”
Moving into the Elizabethan mansion house has been no small feat. The room she is speaking to me from has original plasterwork on the ceiling from 1601, detailing the “fruits, herbs and spices that were used to treat Henry VIII”; there’s Elizabethan oak panelling in the oldest section of the house and all the fireplaces are original.
“The reality of living in a very old house like this is that something always needs doing. It’s quite a weighty task. I’m very aware that it’s been kept so beautifully by each generation to preserve it for the future.”
That’s not to say the family is living in an untouchable relic. Since moving in, Goddard has renovated the family kitchen, turning it into a large open-plan space “that we were used to from our Hackney life”. She has also updated the windows, so they are double glazed, and is heating the house using a biomass boiler and fuel from estate timber to help with costs.
Keeping historic houses running is precarious work. Matthew Beckett runs the website Lost Heritage, dedicated to documenting the many significant English country houses which have been demolished or severely reduced. He estimates 1,980 country houses have been demolished, severely reduced in size or are ruined, with a further 52 across the whole of the UK at risk.
“The issue of cost has always been at the heart of the story of the country house,” Beckett says. “There are numerous instances of the building of a house bankrupting the owner before they even had a chance to complete it and move in. Ambition is rarely fully realised, except in the most exceptional circumstances.”
He says VAT charged on restoration, as well as inflation that has driven up costs of utilities and maintenance, adds to the huge running costs of managing a large country house (he cites the Palladian pile Holkham Hall in Norfolk, which costs several hundreds of thousands a year to run). But, he adds, “many of the [financial] challenges are cyclical, and owners can find ways to adapt and ride out harder times”. Holkham is a good example — the estate has farming and commercial tenants, a caravan park, a hotel and restaurant and cafés.
Like Holkham, some of the upkeep of Borde Hill is paid for from residential and commercial tenants who generate income from the wider 2,300-acre estate. But another source of income is ticket sales into the 383-acre estate with Grade II*-listed parkland and the gardens that the family have been collecting for centuries, now with more than 8,000 plants, some of which are the only examples in England.
One of Goddard’s early moves was to extend the opening of the gardens to 11 months of the year, but this year she is diversifying the business model further, with festivals and farm-to-table dining experiences, not only to generate more income, but to attract a more diverse crowd. She also has ambitious plans that involve an application for a £3.6mn National Lottery grant to develop the southern part of the estate, adding paths and amenities including a coffee shop and toilets, as well as an educational eco- lodge. Her new line of work doesn’t remunerate her in the same way as her previous corporate jobs. “Right now, the rewards are far greater emotionally and for future generations of my family,” she says with a smile.
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