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Village Voice June/July 2020
PENN HOUSE
ESTATE NEWS
“Often it takes a crisis to make people
focus on what and who really matters to
them; and the answer seems to be,
encouragingly, that what matters is people
– relationships, a steady background of
affection and trust, the ability to nourish
love and friendship by shared activities
and shared enjoyment.”
Like me, I am sure many will feel that these
recent words from Dr Rowan Williams, the
former Archbishop of Canterbury, capture the
positive aspect of the confined way of life we
are all leading during the current Covid
emergency.
However, I am surely not alone, either, in
being immensely thankful for the open spaces
we have around us in Penn and Tylers Green,
which make that confinement so much more
bearable. Throughout my time as the custodian
of the Penn House Estate, I have been keen to
ensure that it remains not only accessible to
local residents but also somewhere that we can
www.pennandtylersgreen.org.uk
genuinely call ‘special’; that is to say, a
landscape that advertises the characteristic
features of the southern Chilterns to their best
advantage. My wife and I walk the local
footpaths across the estate for at least an hour
each day, and it has been wonderful to see how
many people from our community are doing the
same thing, albeit respecting the disciplines of
social distancing.
Maintaining and enhancing a
landscape as lovely as this one is
rewarding, but it is a far-fromstraightforward
task. Almost all
landscapes in this country are
the product of human effort, and
their conservation is, by the
same token, a constant yearround
mission. On the Penn
House Estate this depends,
chiefly, on two enterprises:
arable farming and woodland
management. In a good year –
that is to say, when the weather
is reasonably favourable – we
manage satisfactorily to grow a
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