Concrete, mud and reversing

The Yard.

The turning circle between the grain store, the workshop and the back of the shop. It is where the farm actually operates, and what it mostly consists of is reversing a trailer badly.

At: 0.3 miles
In frame: Workshop, store, bowser
Also on camera: Live, all year

The whole route Watch it live

On the walk

What is here.

Everything crosses this concrete. Grain going into store, machinery coming out of the workshop, deliveries for the shop, and at harvest a trailer roughly every twenty minutes from nine in the morning until it is too damp to cut.

It is also the least photogenic place on the estate and the one with the most going on, which is a reliable rule about farms.

On the walk this is the only stop where you are standing in a working area rather than looking at one. In the real world you would not be here without a reason and a high-visibility jacket.

The record

What happened here.

The yard is where the Lamborghini R8 spent most of Chapter 1 failing to get through a gate. It is where the grain store was built, argued about, and eventually used for something other than grain.

It is also where the practical limit on visiting becomes obvious. A working yard with a combine in it is not a place you can put four hundred members of the public, and no amount of goodwill changes the turning circle of a trailer.

At
0.3 miles: In frame
Workshop, store, bowser: Also on camera
Live, all year

How it was made

The arithmetic

What it costs to keep.

The Yard

Concrete apron, laid: £65 to £95 a square metreAnd it does not last forever.
Pressure washing: Most Fridays, January to MarchMud is structural here.
Grain store, running: Fans, drying and insuranceDrying costs money the crop has not got.
Insurance on the yard: Rises every yearBecause the machinery in it does.

Costs are indicative ranges for work of this kind in this part of the country, not invoices. Where a figure is a published estate number rather than a general one, it says so in the row.

On the walk