Sue Woodcock lives 1,000ft up on a hillside in the Yorkshire Dales, with views
stretching 80 miles on a good day. Her home, Mire House, looks like a
typical two-up, two-down sturdy Yorkshire stone farmhouse, with walls 2ft
thick and big stone tiles on the roof. Admittedly, it needs complete
renovation and modernisation, but it is certainly not falling down. She pays
council tax, and Craven district council collects her rubbish.
However, as far as local planners are concerned, Mire House doesn’t live up to
its name. They call it a sheep shelter, say it has been abandoned for 60
years, and they want her out. Woodcock says it is most definitely a house,
she owns it and she is staying. The planning battle that has ensued as a
result is a salutary lesson to anyone who is thinking of buying a remote,
run-down property.
Woodcock bought Mire House two and a half years ago, paying £130,000 directly
to its owner, a local landowner — there was no mortgage. A retired Hampshire
police constable who had been decorated for bravery, she had retired to
Settle in Cumbria, 12 miles away, before spotting her isolated home, about a
mile above the village of Grassington, near Skipton, North Yorkshire. She
thought it the perfect place to live quietly and concentrate on the
thrillers she writes.
The 57-year-old divorcee admits her solicitor had reservations about buying
such a dilapidated place, but Woodcock pressed ahead. “I didn’t think I
would need planning permission just to move in,” she says.
However, there is a good reason why the Planning Officers Society urges anyone
buying such properties to check their status before going ahead with a
purchase.
In the eyes of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, the local planning
authority concerned, Mire House had long ago stopped being a house. Peter
Watson, its head of planning, says there have been no rates records for it
since the second world war and that it has been used as a sheep shelter for
years, meaning its official use had changed. “There is a national policy
against encouraging housing in open countryside unless there is a good
reason for it,” he says.
Allowing abandoned buildings such as Mire House to be reoccupied would mean a
“gradual urbanisation” of the countryside, because of all the activity, such
as car use, and “residential paraphernalia” of modern life. “People who
lived here before would have had a very simple life and travelled by foot,”
he adds.
Although Woodcock admits she has a car — there is already an access track to a
nearby road — her desire to live a very, very simple life is precisely why
she bought the place. A qualified shepherd whose ancestors farmed in the
region, she keeps rare-breed sheep, a turkey, chickens, geese and ducks in
the 25 acres surrounding the house, and sells woven craft products in local
shops. “All I want to do is write my books, look after my animals and spin
my wool,” she says.
Conditions at Mire House are very basic. Water is pumped from a well into a
downstairs tap; a diesel generator provides occasional electricity. Hot
water comes from a wood-burning stove in the living room and a Rayburn in
the kitchen. There’s a Calor gas fridge, cooker and camping lights; there is
no bathroom, no sewerage, and the lavatory is a chemical one. So far, so
primitive.
However, Woodcock’s renovation plans are also modest. She wants to install a
reed-bed sewerage system and a bathroom; repair and replaster the home’s
interior; replace the missing guttering; and rebuild two small side rooms,
the existing footings of which can still be seen. The result will be a
modest three-bedroom home. She doesn’t want mains electricity, and would
even do without the extra rooms; there are barns attached, but she doesn’t
want to convert them, and expects to spend just £50,000: “I am not a
property developer.”
Before buying, she claims she had informal talks with the relevant planners
about restoration work, and acknowledges that they raised the abandonment
issue, but adds that the officer she spoke to told her that living there
would not be a problem if she was involved in agriculture. The park
authority, however, denies giving her any such assurance, and there is no
paper trail to support her claim. The row began when she applied for
planning permission to renovate. The local authority rejected her plans, and
pointed out that she shouldn’t be living there.
“In line with national policy, we allow essential agricultural use,” says
Peter Watson. “If a genuine farmer had applied who could demonstrate a need
to live there that would have been acceptable, but Mrs Woodcock is running
it as a smallholding, and doesn’t comply with the tests of agricultural
viability.”
Woodcock’s plight has won her sympathy from much of the local community,
including the parish council. We are 100% behind her,” says councillor John
Benson. “This property is one of the last remaining examples of the way
croft farming used to be carried out in the Dales. To let it go to rack and
ruin is ridiculous when someone is willing to live there.”
For a ruin is what Mire House will become if it remains uninhabited. If an
abandoned house does not get permission to convert once again to a dwelling,
owners cannot even carry out simple renovations of the kind Woodcock wants
to do, and as Mire House is not a listed building, there is no obligation to
keep it in good repair. And that means Woodcock has also won qualified
support from a slightly unexpected quarter. The Campaign to Protect Rural
England (CPRE), which is normally fiercely protective of open spaces, would
usually support policies that kept such “abandoned” dwellings from being
reoccupied, but John Farquhar, who handles planning issues for CPRE in North
Yorkshire, says there are some cases which are borderline.
“It could be that the best solution is to have someone live there, and if this
lady is willing to do so, then I’d say good luck to her,” he says.
Steve Quartermain, senior vice-president of the Planning Officers Society,
says abandoned houses losing their status as homes is nothing new. But an
increasing reluctance to allow conversion of agricultural buildings in
remote areas is highlighting the issue. “Across the country, planning
authorities have a sustainability agenda and are looking at lack of
transport, the need to travel and CO2 emissions,” he says.
Woodcock is waiting for the outcome of her appeal to the Planning
Inspectorate, which will visit the property on March 19. “I think the
national park does a lot of good things, but I am not doing any harm to
anyone,” she says. “If I leave, this house will one day fall down and become
just a desolate landscape for walkers to gape at.”
