This blog started in Sep 2010, to capture stories from my home village Höfen in Southern Germany, where I was going to live again for one year. I’m now living back in London, and I keep thinking about what is rural.
I love barns – those which are still unheated, unpaved and with little lighting. Around here most of them have lost their initial function – to keep the live stock and store hay/straw, wood and grain. Of the top of my head I know of 22 such barns in the village. A farmer friend recently called them “spaces for hot air”, and the amount of left over and empty built volume across the countryside is astonishing. Nothing much happens in many of those barns – only a few have been converted and the rest keeps providing rather raw space – which is rather rare.
Ours is for cutting timber once in a while, storing planks and all sorts of trolleys, being able to keep absolutely everything that you actually don’t need anymore but might need one day, and a “village museum” by my father which consists of old farming equipment and random objects. The barn smells of cold and dust, and is one of the calmest spaces I know.