I’m not sure what constitutes a Trust, but they definitely have domestic fowl – lots of them. To reach these, however, you to run the gamut of a display of bijou chicken coops.
Chook-keeping is now the province of the chattering classes - I should know; I’m a member of it. And when Chatterers have finished accessorising their Chihuahuas, their thoughts turn to livestock.
At Honeybourne, you can buy hexagonal chicken mansions with separate duplex apartments for each resident or tiled and gabled multi-storey chalets for winter sports chooks. Low-slung wheeled affairs, like avian Ferraris, are designed for moving about the landscape when you or your hens fancy a change of vista. Suddenly, our purchase of a chicken coop simply
because it was cheap, solid and suitable for keeping chickens in seems so prosaic.Of course there’s J’s chicken coop, which is in a whole other league. J’s coop has attics, neat little house-that-jack-built windows and a shingled roof. It cost her precisely nothing, being her daughter’s former wendy house, a present in turn from a posh patron whose children had out-grown it. J’s chooks, good honest battery rescues unlike my effete pure-breds, nest happily at different levels, peering out of the windows like eager Cranford spinsters.
Our coop is virtually indestructible, so there’s no hope of replacing it. But whenever we return to Honeybourne to stock up on red mite powder or laying pellets, I stare with hopeless longing at these pleasure palaces, wishing I was chicken-sized and rich.
We did buy our chooks themselves from Honeybourne. But that just means they’ve been bred for better things. No wonder they’ve taken to hanging around our neighbours’ gardens and laying in out-of-the-way places.
They’re probably house-hunting.
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