I read a comment on whether anyone reads blogs and journals. I hope someone does! Although nowadays it is becoming impossible to know if it’s been written by humans or a robot: the suggestion is that humans are becoming redundant. Our son says the bots are so clever now they can write like you, even if it isn’t you.

It has been a busy few months again, there have been diggers preparing to put in a water treatment unit for the new lodge in the walled garden.

We’ve had United Utilities digging up the drive and now have to close the road to try and find our stop tap. We think the council might have filled it in with concrete when they were re-enforcing the drains.

Tom has been gapping and tidying the cheekings on some of the dry stone walls. The other Tom has been scaling heights cutting down ash trees that are sadly dying from ash die-back disease.

Shaun, Gary, Martin, Mark and Stephen have been building the new lodge. It’s not finished yet, but should be by November/December.

At the back end, it’s always time to trim the yew trees. Eight of them stand on the upper terrace and they’ve been there since Tudor times; probably Cuthbert Hutton planted them. However, they didn’t have blogs in those days to record everything so we’re not sure of the exact date. It takes, Dave and Sue 3 full days and a cherry picker to complete the job. One of the trees had a skirt that had been dying back for some years. I made the worrying decision that it needed to be cut off completely. Yew is very resilient and thankfully the tree seems fine. But you don’t want to be the one who kills off one of 8 trees, just about as tall as the house that has been with us for about 500 years. Think of the shame!

We’ve had lots of lovely guests staying, notably more Americans and Dutch this year than ever before. Yew Tree, (I wonder what inspired that name?) and Bluebell Cabins opened earlier in the year and have been welcoming guests ever since. The last cabin is being started in October. I like to keep the team busy and out of mischief. But the most pleasing has been the positive reviews we have had. Great comments about the location, the standard of fittings and fixtures, the buildings themselves and how clean the properties are.  I always pass on these comments and it makes me and the rest of the team here 😊. My son says only old people use emojis so that is for you Max.

So Humans are after all very useful and not yet redundant.

All the best, Kate.

P.S. no bots were harmed in the making of this blog.😀🌳🍂 I can feel my son’s disapproval but I quite like an emoji or 3.