East Heddle
These pages look at the restoration and re-development of East Heddle. East Heddle is the next door Croft and farmstead, situated about 200 yards to the North East. This task began with purchase of the site from Davy Wilson in 2003. Sadly he sold the surrounding land (70 acres) in the summer of 2000 so what I bought was the Croft and about 2 acres of the immediate land.
Though this was an auspicious day for me I did not fully comprehend the size of the task awaiting. Davy had lived here for over 50 years, firstly with his family and for the last twenty or so on his own. Back in the day he was a talented carpenter, good stone builder and handy mechanic, possessing in abundance all the individual skills required to run a prosperous small holding. For a time in the 1970’s East Heddle was used commercially as a mechanics garage and it was a very successful farm in its time.
But the drink took him. From the late Seventies until He moved down into Finstown in 2000 he stopped. Everything. The result was decay, decay on a monumental scale. In addition to the garage business, Davy had been a collector of just about everything and added to this, is typical Orcadian style the farm had accumulated all the debris associated with the previous half of the 20th century and even beyond that back into the 19th.
In simple terms, when a machine broke badly, or was superseded by a more modern solution the old model was just left where it stood. If you add to this the habit keeping everything just in case (a Wartime habit still evident in many Octogenarians today) and then add a collectors obsession and overlay a commercial garage business it is a recipe for junk. Junk on a breathtaking scale.
At the time of writing (April 2008) I am in final negotiations with builders and I expect work to begin by mid-May. I will update.
You can view this as a pictorial record in the photo galleries section.
