Home Barn is set in a quiet hamlet of nine houses and it combines tranquil fields and orchards with the busy town of Yeovil only two miles away. The area is rich in wildlife including owls, woodpeckers, badgers, deer and bats. If you are up early in the morning it is not unusual to see deer visiting our ponds from the bedroom window!
Our house was a barn for about 200 hundred years before we converted it into our family home in 2000. Our family moved to Mudford Sock in the late 1930s, and our three children, now grown up, are the fourth generation to live on Sock Dairy Farm.
We are often asked what the name ‘Mudford Sock’ means? The name is unique because it links the nearby village of Mudford, which marked a place where the River Yeo could be crossed, and ‘Sock’, which is an old name for an area of marsh or streams. Nowadays there are very few marshes near and we are surrounded by lush fields and orchards, typical of the scenery of rural South Somerset.
Glen owns a successful bespoke joinery and kitchen business, also based on the farm. He enjoyed using his skills to design our unique home, including the central oak staircase and floors and original beams and stonework.
There is an enclosed sunny seating area in the garden at the front of Shippon Barn.
Beyond Shippon Barn lie a wealth of country walks. We are on the Leland Trail; a 28-mile footpath that runs across South Somerset from King Alfred’s Tower to Ham Hill Country Park. The trail was named after John Leland who visited South Somerset in the 16th Century, in his role as royal librarian to King Henry VIII, to map the ‘antiquities’ of local churches. In addition, there are a number of local walks from Home Barn including a few with local pubs en route offering good local pub food.
We are committed to sustainability and we installed a bio mass boiler in 2015 which uses wood from our joinery as well as local wood to heat the house.