A fire officer suggested that we invest a million pounds and open a hotel, but I’m not sure I like people, but not that much. But we have already turned one side of the house into self-contained units, which we could have as a honeymoon suite for Saturday nights.”Then there is always the option of weddings and functions I actually have a booking for a wedding in August 2000. The safety people said we would have to split up the large hallway with fire doors. “I’ve thought about doing bed and breakfast, but the house is too big. “All this sort of stuff is jobs for the girls.” The changes seem only beginning.

She considered starting a creche but decided that Lady, the German shepherd, Gromit, the springer, and Sorrel, the giant deerhound, who follow baby George everywhere, might frighten off some mothers.”We’re always looking for new opportunities,” says Mrs Dinnis. Some of the cars are tenants living in once-derelict cottages, which Mrs Dinnis renovated for renting. “We had to redecorate them, choose new carpets, and put in central heating and new kitchens,” says Mrs Dinnis. Upstairs, on the third floor, there is a bare, timbered room untouched for decades. Here, you can still catch a slight whiff of the chickens that were housed here during the war to protect them from foxes.Yet such is the current activity in this backwater that the family has had to erect barriers made of old tyres in the road to slow down the considerable traffic.

And the house itself feels ancient, with its large, squat front door opening up into a vast hallway. In the tile-floored cellar, where Mrs Dinnis brews walnut wine, it is not difficult to believe the story that 1,000 Roundheads hid there as a Royalist army searched the district where Oliver Cromwell’s sister lived. She is well qualified to develop the farm’s assets and do the accounts.In 1989, she oversaw the conversion of farm buildings into small workshops. “Now,” she says, “we have five small units, with one making furniture, another doing gearboxes, another selling midwifery equipment, one making signs and the fifth supplying water-purifying equipment.”You do not expect such a buzz of activity as you arrive at Filston Farm, down a single track, which is almost overwhelmed by tall hedges and leads into an apparently sleepy yard There are kingfishers in the moat. Julie’s father is a civil engineer and she brought fresh skills and outlook to the farm.

First, of course, was her love of horses, with which she spent much of her youth. But before marrying, she also worked in project management for a land agent. I had to convince John that they would not destroy the crops.”Gradually, the farm is becoming like a golf course, charging the equivalent of green fees for horse-lovers to enjoy a day out. And Mrs Dinnis has also spotted the potential for building off-farm business, establishing herself as the county’s co-ordinator for the supply of chopped straw bedding for stables.In many ways, John is lucky that he did not marry a farmer’s daughter. “About five years ago we set up a farm ride along the headlands of the fields These are the least productive areas But it took a while.