The remains of the day

 The sun shone all day and it was warm enough to leave the door open as I like to do. I made cake and soup, I did two washes and hung them out to dry, I fetched in logs, I cut and raked and cleared away dead foliage and clippings, I planted a rhubarb crown. It was still fine so I went for a walk on the coast  before the sun set.

Here's a place I've blipped before, an old farmstead dating from around 1800: a single storey dwelling with a big fireplace, a rough stone floor and a half-loft accessed by a ladder. Peeping around its shoulder is the new house built to replace it in the early part of the last century. I often wonder how the family felt on the day they foresook the old home for the new and migrated across the farmyard. I imagine that the children were excited, running around the new rooms and up and down the unfamiliar staircase. Their parents must have been proud to take possession of a superior property with (eventually) running water,  electric light and indoor sanitation. The grandparents? Perhaps they regretted the loss of the woodsmoky old hearth and the cosy intimacy of the lamplight, the thick walls and tiny windows that protected them from the onshore gales. Perhaps they didn't move into the modern farmhouse but stayed put in the old home until they were carried out feet first. Who knows? The old place became a workshop for fixing agricultural repairs and the whole farm was bought by the National Trust in the 1970s. The new house is a holiday let and its predecessor, reroofed, is preserved as a specimen of its type. No records remain of the people who were born, lived and died here. Their day is over and gone.