When we extended our popular meeting room by knocking through into a redundant tin barn I had the bright idea of having a ‘living’ roof. Cathy, despite immediately correctly sensing that this would be yet another in a long line of green ideas that would be unlikely to save the planet but guaranteed to cost us a fortune, reluctantly agreed and we broke the news to Brian the Builder before he commenced work.

The barn that was being replaced had a nearly flat roof - which was ideal - and so the main requirement was to beef up the walls in order to take the weight of the sodden sods on top.

Building anything these days is expensive but I was quite please that the extra timber and the special membranes for the roof had only added a few hundred pounds to the overall cost and decided that we could save a few quid by doing the actual grassing-over ourselves. However, come the spring, when the building was eventually finished (barely three months over date) we had already started lambing and with the camping season nearly upon us I decided to put off the earth moving until the autumn.

All summer long people admired our new addition but wondered what the wooden retaining rail around the roof was. “That’s going to be a grass roof” I would explain looking up, and the more I looked at it the more daunting the task seemed to be.

The perfect opportunity presented itself a couple of weekends ago as Evan (the digger driver) was here ripping up the camping field in order to lay a new track and I had some unpaid labour in the form of an old army buddy. Roger had motored down on the Sunday and we had a very pleasant afternoon at the beach followed by a full roast dinner and plenty of wine in the evening. Once he was nicely mellowed I broke it to him gently that I had a small job for us the next day. “No problem” he said after his third glass of vin de rouge.

We soon gave up with the hired turf cutter, as this impressive looking machine was a pig to operate and the resulting turfs – though very neatly cut – were wafer thin and no use for this job. So we hacked into the field with the digger and hauled up rough and ready chunks of field with the aid of the tractor loader and knitted them together like some giant jigsaw. The actual roof is (thankfully) only nine metres by four, but even when laying clods of earth and turf that were less than six inches thick this equates to about six tonnes of material to hoist up. 

To say that we were knackered after two days would be an understatement. To say that on close inspection it was a pretty job would be a slight exaggeration. However I can say that I am exceptionally pleased and proud with the result – anyone for crochet?