‘Our countryside is as precious as any cathedral’
COUNTRY LIFE, November 13, 2013
ALMOST four decades have passed since Fred and Vera Hutchings of Yardworthy Farm, near Chagford in Devon, played host to the heir to the throne. It was February 1983. Tentative first breaths of spring flecked the craggy moorland expanses around the Hutchings’ farm on the north-east edge of Dartmoor. No fanfare attended the week-long visit of the then Prince of Wales to this small, Duchy of Cornwall-owned dairy farm. Only after The Prince’s departure did Buckingham Palace issue a statement explaining his wish to gain first-hand experience of life on a Duchy farm, taking part ‘in a full range of farm tasks during the working day, which lasts from 7am until after 6 in the evening’.
For the future king, his visit to Dartmoor confirmed deeply held convictions about our relationship with the world around us. Those convictions shaped diverse initiatives throughout the half century during which Britain’s longest-serving Prince of Wales exercised benign and engaged stewardship of the Duchy of Cornwall. His fleeting interlude at
