The French windows open onto the private patio and large enclosed grassy garden. With apple, peach and cherry trees, and beds stocked with mature budleia, salix,  japonica, hybiscus and forsythia, it is a fine place to relax (and weed!). Steps lead up through the  rockery into the woodland.

The rough grassy garden has been re-seeded since the grass was rather chewed up in the process of replacing the roof in Autumn 2010. There is a BBQ and assorted garden loungers which are all usually kept in the garage, along with three bikes.

To the front of the house, across the lane, is a rough field with damson, yellow plum and peach trees, and more buddleia and flowering red-currants. The field can sometimes resemble a hayfield, as in this picture at the end of a hot dry summer, but is now mown more regularly.

The old stone-built communal bread oven sits in the field across the lane. No longer in use, it is on communal land, but maintained by us since it is such an intriguing feature and just outside the kitchen window.

There is a sizeable deciduous woodland to be explored on the hill behind the cottage - the hillside is lovely but a bit of a scramble in places. The rockface exposed by the old quarryings rises above the garden (and the all-important woodshed).

It is a really unspoilt environment - we regularly see red squirrel, lots of lizards, salamander, and deer. There are also boar very occasionally in the woods, numerous birds of prey (kites, buzzards, and more). Birds are numerous, including kingfishers by the river, heron, etc, and owls nesting in the ruined barn, and in Spring we have once or twice been kept up for hours at night by nightingales singing in trees just next to the house.    Cowslips and wild cyclamen are all over the place in the spring.

Secure car parking is at the end of the garden, behind (now blue) 5-bar gates.