In June of 2014, a little over a year ago, we arrived in our new home in North Cornwall, just outside the lovely moorland village of Altarnun. The move to this beautiful part of the world is something that we had spoken about doing for many years, though in truth we rather suspected it might need to wait for our retirement! But life had other ideas, and when some kind Whitehall bureaucrat decided that they needed a high speed rail line to Birmingham, and that this line – the HS2 high speed railway – would be going straight through the garden of our pretty Northamptonshire cottage, it was time to take things into our own hands, and take the plunge.

We were incredibly lucky to find a home on the very edge of Bodmin Moor, one of Cornwall’s wild beauty spots and an AONB, tucked away but within easy reach of the…