Farms National Treasures of Wales

The National Trust has more than four million members.

It's Britain's largest landowner.

As English as cream teas.

Or is it?

Because it all began...in Wales.

Where it continues to look after the treasures of this beautiful country.

But I want to find out what the future holds for this guardian

of our shared past.

Gorgeous, isn't it?

That's prime Welsh countryside behind me -

but it's also in a fundamental way

a sort of museum of our own history - a living, working museum.

'The National Trust has taken on the role of curator of that museum

'for the 231 tenanted farms it owns here in Wales.

'What does it take to be one of their farmers?'

I couldn't just pop up as an ex-comedian

and say, "Sorry, I want I look after a farm"!?

'How do they cope with all those redundant farm buildings?'

Can't cost a lot to restore, can it?

'And how do they encourage nature, provide access

'and help this living museum to pay its way?'

What sort of landlord does it want to be?

The National Trust owns farmland all over Wales

but it owns a slightly disproportionate amount

in high uplands - in Snowdonia, places like that, because it's

beautiful and romantic land.

It was as a result of owning coastland

and buying up coastland that it started to acquire a slightly

wider portfolio of types of farms

and it's now become of interest to it

to expand that portfolio

and cover more of the history of farming in Wales.

One of the places where the Trust is addressing that history

is here in Treleddyd Fawr, close to St David's in North Pembrokeshire.

I've come to see the Trust's latest bequest -

it was left to them on the death of its owner, Mr Griffiths.

They've accepted it, which according to the Trust director,

Justin Albert, is unusual.

I get offered a lot of properties on an almost weekly basis and people

presume that the National Trust can take things on - we can't.

As a charity we can't take on things that will be a

financial drain unless it is of such cultural importance and so at risk

and nobody else can take it on, we will then have to take it on.

So, what is so special about this little farm worker's cottage?

Less than 100 years ago

cottages like this littered the Welsh landscape,

almost literally,

because over here there was a sort of system of dispersed villages

with labourers living in little cottages out in the fields.

But it's extraordinary how much of that has been swept away.

Farming is now done by far fewer people.

As a result, many fell into ruin.

The rest? Well, they were either turned into holiday cottages

or they were converted. And we can't exactly blame people.

Because this is a very wet and windy area.

You need a sealed roof,

you need windows that shut, you want a proper

central-heating system, bathroom...

and all those things changed cottages completely.

As a result this simple place is very rare.

Mr Griffiths who used to live here, he was bathing in a tin bath

in front of the fire up until the day he left.

Nathan Goss, the National Trust's building consultant,

is showing me around.

The porch is fantastic - it's one piece of slate up on the top here,

I absolutely love that detail.

I love to see a man, you see, in love with things which other people might not even notice.

This is in the eye of the beholder.

So I or anybody else might come here and go "Oh, well, it's all right, interesting."

But this to you is something you just don't see any more?

I believe that this is the only traditional tythan -

small homestead - left in Northern Pembrokeshire untouched.

Nathan, it's clear to see, loves it - every bit of it.

I believe it needs to be a holiday cottage

and it needs to be an experience.

And if Nathan gets his way it will certainly be

a hell of an experience.

And that is the only bit of modern plumbing in the entire place?

-Yes. That's everything - there!

-Really?

-This is the bathroom!

-Nothing inside at all?

-Nothing at all.

And you're going to preserve that?

-I'd like to, yes.

-Would you?

-Ooh, yeah.

You'd like people to come here and stay in this cottage

and have to go out in the middle of the night to use...?

100%.

In your dreams.

THEY CHUCKLE

This is my favourite window in the whole cottage.

I challenge you to walk past this and not smile.

GRIFF CHUCKLES

Perfectly proportioned window.

OK, let's have a look at the roof here, Nathan.

Tell me about this roof.

The top section of the roof, as you can see, is the traditional

Pembrokeshire roof - it's slate with lime slurry poured over the top.

-OK, and that's called a grouted roof?

-A grouted roof.

And why did they pour the lime over the slate?

Pembrokeshire slate is traditionally poor, it will

last about ten years, you might be lucky if you get 20 out of it.

They came up with a mix they could pour straight over the top

and put on with a brush.

Once a year get up on the roof, tie yourself to the chimney

and away to go.

This is a tradition unique to this part of the world

and the roof is one of the reasons the Trust has agreed to take it on.

Your ideal would be to save as much of this...

bodge as possible?

The back section we might. The front section, I'm saying no.

But I can only say from what I've seen from the outside.

So you have to hold up the whole building at the moment?

Yeah, the whole building is extremely dangerous at the moment.

The weight of the roof is coming straight down.

It's Welsh wallpaper mania in here.

I think there's 26 layers above that fireplace there.

Look at that! One of the things that you find

about Welsh cottages is that people loved their wallpaper

and they just kept putting more of those... Those are beautiful.

Going back in time. Got to be careful.

-Got to preserve that and keep that!

-Oh, no.

-Now look what I've done.

Note to self - hands in pockets during site visits.

There are some significant features here

unique to a farm labourer's cottage.

It's not even a cut beam. Just a piece of branch to hold up

the fireplace.

One of the traditional features is this internal porch that

stops the draft from the front door.

This is a particular detail which you don't find in many

buildings any more. This partition.

And other more everyday details.

You missed one fantastic detail which is this wonderful cobweb.

-I saw the cobweb, you're not going to keep the cobweb?

-Well...

HE LAUGHS

..we could try.

But in the end you have to ask - what exactly are we saving here?

I know we love it but there's going to be an army of experts

involved coming in to discuss it. I mean, two-up-two-down.

There's going to be a legion of expert conservators coming - this isn't...

this isn't built by Inigo Jones, no architect was involved here,

this isn't a great 17th-century mansion that reflects the political history of our country - why,

why this place?

I think this place is probably more important than a 17th-century mansion to me

and to the people in Pembrokeshire and to other architects.

It is the Brad Pitt of cottages.

It's the most photographed,

filmed, drawn cottage in the whole of Pembrokeshire,

probably in the whole of Wales.

If we lose this now then you've taken a...

you've lost a whole section of history.

There are a number of conditions which any property

that the National Trust takes on has to fulfil.

It has to be aesthetically interesting in some way,

it to be rather beautiful. I think this place is.

It has to have a conservation angle to it -

it has to be saved

because it's the last of its type or it's in danger of being

lost for ever,

and that's true about this place.

And perhaps most important of all,

but sometimes the most difficult to fulfil - it has to find a way

of paying for itself in the future.

Now, here that's quite difficult,

because there's only an acre of land and that's hardly a rich endowment.

The Trust can't make money by farming here nor can they charge

at the door like they do for, say, Powis Castle.

The only option

is really to rent it to people

looking for an authentic 18th-century experience.

Well, it's not a big place,

which you might regard is the entire point,

but it's not entirely in great nick.

Still, small - can't cost a lot to restore, can it?

CASH REGISTER RINGS

COINS RATTLE

I've, er, restored a cottage myself and, er,

because we were on telly I absolutely wanted to do it right

and...

I think it's probably the most expensive thing I've ever done

because there are so many different ways of doing things

and so many levels

of heritage, er, conservation

that you could get.

A fair criticism

is that we would do something to such a degree of perfection

that it became unsustainable for anyone else other than

a reasonably spendthrift charity so, no, I think we will not do that

at Treleddyd Fawr - we'll use traditional craft skills

and we'll make it wonderful

but we're not going to turn it into a pit which we can throw money in

to get the perfect join here - I don't see it as my duty to do that,

particularly if no-one can see it.

Sorry, I don't.

HE CHUCKLES

Boy, my conservators are going to kill me for saying this - but they're still wrong.

However the details of restoration are settled in the future,

the big picture is that this acquisition

shows a new way of thinking.

It's interesting from the point of view of the National Trust

because buying this is part of a slightly different

policy in relation to farms and the countryside.

A lot of the land they own is in the north of Wales

and in romantic landscapes,

landscapes which intellectuals associated with the sublime and the glorious,

and hence you have hill farms and bits of Snowdonia and mountains.

But there's not much that tells the OTHER story of agriculture -

the hard toil, the smallholding - and that's why this place is important.

Changes in priorities are affecting the way the Trust manages

the land as well as the buildings they own.

One of the things that's rather interesting about the National Trust

is that it is a form of autocracy.

Essentially somebody needs to be there setting standards

and saying, "This is EXACTLY what will happen."

To understand more about setting those standards I've come

to Trehill Farm in South Pembrokeshire.

Jonathan Hughes

is the Trust's land manager here.

-Would you tell me what to do?

-No, we wouldn't tell you what to do,

we would agree broad parameters right at the outset

and say these are the type of things we're

looking for from, you know, this particular farm.

What ones have you had where you go, "That's a good idea, let's do that"?

One of them would be around public access and enjoyment,

so if you can accommodate people coming there, whether it's for

education groups or people camping, something like that.

I think we'd be very open to ideas which

introduce people into the landscape.

I think we'd be very interested in broadening biodiversity,

so widening hedge banks, creating ponds, that type of thing.

Right.

If there were areas that would traditionally have been wet

but have been drained in the last 50 years and you could allow

those to become wetter and broaden the range of flowers

and insects that would grow there, we would be very supportive of that.

Here at Trehill they farm 600 acres

and at first glance it looks like any other farm

but it's a trust tenancy

and things are never that simple. Appearances can be deceptive.

About two weeks ago my son came in laughing and he said to me,

"Mum, Mum, I'm not quite sure what's going on but there's a lady outside

"who's just asked if she could use the bathroom.

"So I've just shown her into the house."

And I just wish I'd been a bit quicker to ask her

if she was a member as she left!

Because she'd seen the National Trust sign at the entrance

and decided that as a National Trust member

she could come into our home and use the facilities.

This misconception might be caused by the fact that

most people don't realise that the Trust runs working farms.

There are three main reasons why it owns own agricultural land.

Firstly, as part of the endowment on a stately home.

Secondly, in areas where

they need to preserve a traditional way of life. And thirdly...

This farm here arrived with the National Trust almost by default -

they were after the coastline and they got the farm to go with it.

So they then had to face the question - what do they do with it?

How are they going to farm it?

In order to answer this

we need to understand a little about the recent history of farming.

Most commercial farmers today

have been educated into the post-war consensus

which sees extra productivity, trying to get

the most out of their land as the highest priority, as almost

a sacred duty, but the NT doesn't quite see it that way.

It has other concerns -

they might include tradition,

biodiversity or even the look of the landscape, and that can be

confusing to a farmer who just wants to earn an honest bob.

My father-in-law,

father and mother-in-law came here in 1968 on the back of, um, er,

the sort of "dig for victory" type, erm, ticket if you like.

They were into producing as much food as effectively as they

possibly could - they drained land, they limed land,

they improved the land,

and I say "improved" insomuch as for production they improved it.

Today it has sheep, it has cattle, it has potatoes

and a new set of priorities.

We've now moved into sort of balancing

where we farm the land.

And that land which is most productive

we throw a lot of inputs in - fertilisers, sprays,

pesticides. But there are other parts of our land that aren't quite

so productive and those are the parts of land that we've identified

and said, "Well, actually maybe there isn't much point in throwing all these high-value inputs,

"there's only a finite amount of resources, isn't it better

"to concentrate those resources onto the more productive land?"

Intensive farming is right in some places, it's not right everywhere.

Because it's not sustainable.

If you intensively farm and you do not leave wildlife corridors

you will lose that land eventually, that land ceases to be productive -

your rivers will die, the runoff will kill the rivers,

kill the fish.

It is not a sensible way to perpetuate our...our environment.

Recently this has become the Trust's mantra - it believes that

if you only farm intensively too many species will die out

and eventually the land will become barren.

So the Smithies were encouraged to try a different approach

with several of their coastal fields.

I think it was probably quite hard for Dad at one stage definitely and

he took a while to get his head round the fact that all that work,

all that effort, all the drainage that he put in was being ripped out.

You know, when you see diggers in there and bulldozers in there

pushing soil around, you know, it's quite an emotive thing.

I think he sort of reaps the rewards now

and he started the environmental work with the one-field hofflands

that he put into an environmental scheme in the mid 1980s.

What the Trust and the Smithies wanted to know is what would

happen if the land was returned to what it was like before

intensive farming and fertilisation?

In order to measure this, they treated the three sets

of fields differently, each one having the soil nutrients removed.

What are the results so far?

One thing that very quickly was different was the birds -

there's been a huge

increase of skylarks and choughs.

The ones that were left without any treatment at all just,

basically, grew grass, because there was grass there anyway,

and it's just grown and it's outcompeted everything else.

The soil scraping and the light acidification with a light dose

of sulphur are really the, sort of, ones I'll take you to see.

You know, they're the ones that look good.

They...they've got heather, they've got... And all sorts

of other things which I'm sure a botanist can tell you all about.

But the ones that are as interesting as those are the ones with the high

levels of sulphur that really we don't quite know where they're going.

You know, it's a really long-term project, this isn't

just ten years, this is, sort of, 50 years down the line.

But there are other sides to National Trust involvement too.

There's quite a complicated relationship going on here,

because Peter and Gina pay the National Trust a fee

in order to use their logo to advertise their potatoes.

We have to comply with quite a lot of quite stiff

regulation as to the production of the potatoes and all the crops

and all the animal welfare within the farm.

It's been worth it for us - it gives us a market.

The potato trade is notoriously fickle - you can lose

quite a lot of money very quickly.

People who belong to the National Trust or aspire to belong to

the National Trust trust the brand.

And we're not at the whim of a merchant that says,

"Well, actually, today I'll give you £80 a ton,

"and tomorrow I'll give you 75 and the next day I'll give you 70 and..."

et cetera, et cetera.

So, Peter and Gina pay a fee

and that helps to guarantee an income.

The Trust gets its rent,

and the fee and the customer is buying into a brand or known package

which includes a level of environmental concern.

I think as time goes on we're going to have an increasing

pressure on balancing people paying for good conservation

and people paying for amount of food.

And over the next 10 or 20 years that balance is going to change

as to more money going to good conservation.

And I think one of the jobs of the Trust is to work with our tenants

and other farmers to help that transition.

They're not particularly, as such, interested in the value - pound,

shillings and pence value - of the land, they're more interested

in the value, as in enjoyment and environmental enhancement.

And although they want the rent paid

and so we've got to produce some things, you know,

they are considerate in how they negotiate rentals, I suppose.

At Trehill the Smithies

and the Trust have found a way to set aside marginal land to nature

while still making an income from farming the other fields.

But there are other farms where making money in the modern age

is a much more difficult prospect

and the Trust's intentions here are different.

Like Llyndy Isaf, a 600-acre farm on the side of Snowdon.

What will you try to do there?

Llyndy Isaf is a kind of unique place.

The farmer who had it beforehand for 40 years

maintained an extraordinarily environmentally sensitive...

Way before it was trendy to do,

and he grazed it with natural cattle,

he got rid of the rhododendrons, that were invasive,

and we're going to keep on going with that.

The Trust are also investing in young farmers and shepherds so they

can learn the traditional skills needed to farm this managed wilderness.

We joined Justin on a site visit with Arwyn Owen,

the local farm manager.

There's two full-time shepherds

and then Bryn is here... permanently, actually.

Bryn is out on the hills permanently now.

Such investment costs money.

And if you can't charge on the door, as it were,

how do you balance the books?

Well, the Trust are capitalising on Snowdonia's

unique environment.

In high season, we're taking... what, 6% out of the stream?

The hydroelectric turbine on this farm uses the high rainfall here to

generate enough electricity to power over 400 homes.

I hope we can cover some our costs, if not most of our costs.

But farming on the side of Snowdon?

It's not one of the greatest investments you could make

but it's important for the Trust because we have these three...

the conservation, the finance and the social ambition to do it.

The Trust's social ambition takes many new forms

but it also includes the oldest ideal of the National Trust -

part of its founding ethos -

access.

I'm moving on now...

..to visit another farm, only this is one where

they've taken on one of principles of National Trust ownership

to such a degree that they've become farmers, who don't...

who don't really farm any more.

I'm at Pwll Caerog, a Trust farm

in the southwest of Pembrokeshire, just down the road from St David's.

It still looks like a working farm from the outside

until you open that door and then you go inside and it's a completely

different use to the buildings to what you'd expect.

With the Trust's approval, Ian Griffiths

and his late wife Judy started a bed and breakfast at their

250-acre farm, to supplement their farming income.

In the late '90s it was particularly tough, with cereal prices

exceptionally low, and we were very much under the cosh as farmers.

The Trust helped Ian develop a business plan.

That would give him an income while fulfilling one of the Trust's

main interests - giving access to the land.

CHEERING

We decided to sell the beef herd, sell the machinery

and the tractors and equipment and reinvest that into toilets

and showers and kitchens and dining halls and more bunk beds.

Ian rents the land he doesn't use to neighbouring farmers.

So all these sheds were turned into places for people

to bunk down - 300 at a time.

And they do come - they have a look round the farm,

they may even dig a few spuds and go for a walk along the coastal path.

And this is not only a form of diversification for the farmer,

giving him a bit of income from a different source, it's also

an embodiment of the philosophy of the Trust -

it allows access for people.

The Trust has embraced this in their

Things To Do Before You're 11¾ initiative.

Children are encouraged in

activities in the outdoors, like making a raft, or playing games.

This one child was gazing out to sea and

he said, "What's that out there?"

We said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "Is that a fire out on the horizon?"

And she said, "No, that's the sunset."

To engage children with the countryside and with the sea

and everything is quite rewarding - you feel valued again as a farmer.

The National Trust is a huge landlord.

It looks after a lot of property and, as a result,

as well as just managing that property,

clearly it has a series of responsibilities.

It wants to show that it's doing the right thing.

It has to help its tenant farmers to make a living

while being mindful of the costs of intensive farming.

It has to decide where to invest in

sensitive restoration of historic buildings

and in new green technology.

But it also has to encourage maximum access.

Is there conflict within your own organisation about what

example you should make?

I think there was a greater divergence 10, 20 years ago

in the Trust between those who loved buildings and concrete

and masonry and baroque furniture and those who liked getting naked

and running and jumping into fields and celebrating Mother Earth.

And there were two pulls on the National Trust for a long time.

The Trust has come together and that difference between the people

who wear sandals and brogues is less obvious now.

Whatever your shoe of choice, it's clear that the Trust is

increasingly following a path back to traditional farming methods.

Originally the National Trust was founded to take into care

places of either great historical interest or great natural beauty.

But today we're increasingly learning that you can't have

one without the other.

That farmland like this has its great natural beauty

only if you take account of its history.