Meet the master hut-maker shepherding success

Tracie Beardsley meets Richard Lee, Dorset craftsman, founder of Plankbridge and pioneer of a global revival of shepherd’s huts

In a moment of quiet reverie, she’s rolled out to greet the bright winter sunlight. A majestic diva, she is a super-hut – the shepherd’s hut equivalent of an executive home. This is a luxury lodge made from English oak, insulated with Lakeland sheep’s wool with very modern fittings. Six weeks in the making from chassis to chimney, behind her stands a 37-strong ‘making team’ of skilled Dorset craftspeople - carpenters, joiners, painters, metalworkers and more.

This is the Plankbridge family; they are makers of fine shepherd’s huts, the only ones boasting the prestigious endorsement of the Royal Horticultural Society.

It’s a rural business that enjoyed a 30 per cent increase in turnover with the sudden growth of working from home during the pandemic. As well as garden offices, these shepherds huts are used for accommodation and treatment rooms by the upmarket hotel chain The Pig, by the National Trust for offices and visitor meet and greets, for glamping, as B&Bs, and they are sold to celebrities including TV’s countryside champion Kate Humble, a 90s rock star (whose name must remain a secret) and even, occasionally, to shepherds!

Hardy country huts

At the top of the family tree are Richard Lee and his partner Jane, who started Plankbridge 23 years ago, initially working out of a converted chicken shed. By 2007, they had recruited their first employee, ‘part-time and a big step’.

With 37 employees including Richard’s brother, who makes the chassis units, plus a further dozen ‘crucial’ subcontracted electricians, plumbers and powder coaters, Plankbridge works out of a huge converted grainstore in in Piddlehinton, deep in Thomas Hardy territory.. And it’s thanks to Dorset’s most famous author that the idea of building 21st century shepherds huts came about.

Richard says: ‘We live in the heart of Far From The Madding Crowd

Plankbridge’s 50-strong team of crafts and trades people simultaneously works on a number of huts in various stages of build country. Waterston Manor, the inspiration for Bathsheba’s Weatherby Farm is just down the road. Smitten Farmer Boldwood was at nearby Druce Farm and Hardy’s own cottage at Higher Bockhampton is near us too. ‘Walking my dog near Hardy’s cottage I spotted a dilapidated shepherd’s hut and I started researching. I was self-employed at the time, making kitchen and garden furniture, but it wasn’t really satisfying my creative bent. Back then, lots of people were restoring old huts but I wanted to make my own from scratch, be true to the original style, but with all the modern qualities of a timber-framed building.’

With an on-site forge, even the hut wheels are made by Richard’s team of craftsmen

Richard did just that; his first hut incorporated cavity insulation, a breather membrane and electrics. He kept and used the hut in his garden, and later advertised it and sold it easily. ‘Then a lady from Wells called me wanting to buy it. I told her I’d already sold it but could make her another one – and that’s how the business began!’

Plankbridge now ships much further afield than Wessex. The latest super-hut is bound for the Channel Islands. Huts have been shipped to America and across Europe. One customer, a real shepherd in Scandinavia, needed her hut as protection from wolves! Continuing the Hardy link, Plankbridge also worked on Gabriel Oak’s shepherd’s hut in the 2015 film of Far from the Madding Crowd. Look closely and you may even spot Richard Lee in his role as an extra!

Sitting in the 1921 Bournemouth tram which is now his quirky office, Richard is currently planning his latest creation – The Gardener’s Bothy. Designs are under wraps until the big reveal at RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May, but it will be made from home-grown ash, chestnut and oak.

‘The show is a great launchpad for innovation,’ he says. Richard trained in woodcraft at Hooke Park in Beaminster, the brainchild of renowned furniture maker John Makepeace.

‘Makepeace was ahead of his time – he wanted to make us entrepreneurs in wood. You didn’t just learn to make things. You learned about British timbers, marketing, accounting, running a business. We used to get high-powered furniture designers from London to lecture us, which I found enthralling.

‘I’m really driven by the Arts & Crafts Movement and it’s incredible to think shepherds huts, which historians date back as far as 1596, are still evolving and are now a familiar sight. But now it’s not just in fields – they’re in many back gardens too.’

Quick fire questions:

Dinner party guests around a campfire by your hut?

Musicians Mike Scott from The Waterboys and Paul McCartney, actress Kate Winslet, biological anthropologist Prof Alice Roberts, rewilding expert Derek Gow, American politician and activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and comedian Billy Connolly. That should be an interesting mix!

Current reading list?

A biography of Terry Pratchett – I’m not a particular fan of his work but I like finding biographies of people I don’t know much about. I’m also reading Lee Scofield’s A Wild Fell – Fighting for Nature on a Lake District Farm. Rewilding and nature books are a bit of a passion of mine.

See more on the Plankbridge website: plankbridge.com

Richard is on Facebook as PlankbridgeHutmakers and on Instagram as Plankbridge

Solitairy Girl and her Jack Hobbs filly, foaled 22nd January, 18 days before her due date.

Foaling season has begun, but between the all night camera duty shifts Lucy and Doug have managed to go and see some of ‘their’ foals on the track

Confident that the mare we had been watching on the foaling cameras all night was quietly finishing up her breakfast and knowing that the girls would be arriving shortly to start work for the day, at 7.30am I relaxed my vigil and went to tack up the first horse I had planned to ride. Not long after, I heard a shout of ‘Sway’s foaled!’ and sure enough, in that short time from having shown no outward signs that foaling was imminent, Glanvilles Guest had got on with it on her own, and there in the straw was a lovely, big, chestnut colt. This season’s first foal had arrived the week before, but with the more usual fanfare warning signs that a mare is in labour. At 11.00pm we watched on camera as Solitairy Girl started pacing the box, lying down and then getting up again. At 11.30pm she was starting to get sweaty, at 11.45pm we could see the bag appear and by 11.58 there was a filly foal, lying in the straw being busily licked by her dam. Again, a nice easy foaling with very little help required. This was the seventh foal out of the mare. Her first foal is a 6yo, 128 rated gelding called Soul Icon, who is in training with Kieran Burke and who has won an impressive seven of the eleven hurdle races he has run so far.

Stretch the legs

There is another early February foal due to a mare called Seemarye, who is in foal to the champion British jumps sire, Nathaniel. The mare’s pregnancy is looking huge, and being fat and unwieldy she goes into the allweather turnout and just stands

All images: Courtenay Hitchcock in one place and munches hay all day. Her lack of movement is meaning that her legs are beginning to fill and, as she is too heavily in foal to put on the walker, we are leading her up the track for a really good leg stretch, before she comes back into her stable in the afternoon, just to get her moving and get her circulation going. No more mares are due until early March, so once Seemarye has foaled, Doug and I should get a couple of weeks break from constant night-time camera watching. We might even take the rare opportunity to go away for a few days!

TGS foals at the races

At the same time as the first foal was being born on the stud, Doug was up in Doncaster selling three foals and an infoal broodmare. You may recall I’d talked about their being prepared for the sales in the January column. We had bought the mare, Spirit of Rome, in 2017 as a maiden 3yo filly (which means she was a young horse, had raced on the flat but not won) with a good pedigree. She had since been leased to trainers to add form to her page (a horse’s page in a sales catalogue describes the quality of its racecourse performance plus that of its relatives, going back three or four generations. You can see Spirit of Rome’s here), winning twice and placing seven times over hurdles. We were now trading her on. The foals and the mare were all sold – although some for not as much as we had hoped – and we look forward to following the racing careers of the foals in a few years. From our breeder’s point of view, racing at Wincanton today, Thursday 2nd February* was a real pleasure, with a number of TGS-connected horses running. In the second race, a novices’ handicap steeplechase, Triple

Trade, a 7yo Norse Dancer that we bred out of Doubly Guest came a very good second to a horse carrying 23lbs less than him. As this race was a novice handicap, horses are allotted a weight to carry that is proportionate to how good their previous performances have been. The theory being, if the handicapper does his job perfectly, all the runners will dead heat as the weight they are carrying gives all horses an equal chance. So, if today they had been running off level weights (all carrying the same weight) the finishing positions would likely have been very different. But it was a good race nonetheless and the winner did well to beat the other horses in the race with better form.

The last race, an open, maiden mares National Hunt flat race, saw another TGS-bred horse running: the 6yo Sam’s Amour, a Black Sam Bellamy mare out of the recently retired Aphrodisias (who incidentally is grandma to our first foal born this year!). A second mare in this race, the 4yo Tique, whom we had foaled for her owner Heather Royle and who quickly became a yard favourite due to her extreme friendliness and beauty, was also running. Both ran good races and although they finished out of the placings today, I will never tire of seeing the foals we help bring into the world out doing their jobs on the racetrack.

Breeding a racehorse is just the start of the journey and there are so many pitfalls along the route to their first (and subsequent) races that we always say, ‘Just getting a horse to the racetrack is a win in itself. Actually getting that horse to then win a race is the icing on the cake!’

* yes, I do tend to send in late copy, apologies editor! (Luckily for you - as usualI’m now gripped and have therefore forgotten how late you submitted. Again. - Ed)