QuaterMiss
“It’s your name on the land tenancy.” Eddie to Ed. Have slightly lost track. Is this the Grange Farm land? (Seem to recall some extra bit of land they wanted/had from Hone Farm maybe? Not Grundys’ Field, which they own I think.)
Anyway, surely said for a reason. If Grange Farm then I guess, on top of not being able to move to the new house, Ed has lost them the Grange Farm tenancy too, once Oliver hears ...
Oliver bought Grange Farm house, outbuildings and fifty acres of land. He kept a small dairy herd, then let Ed keep the herd, then gave Ed the money to buy the herd and leased him the land and outbuildings very cheaply. At that point Oliver and Caroline were still living in the house.
Ed has been leasing the fifty acres from Oliver since 2010 or so, at first to keep his dairy herd on and since then for various other schemes he has tired: beef cattle that were stolen, and now Texel sheep.
In December 2015 Oliver decided that he was going to let Grange Farm only the house and garden, not the land to the Grundys because they were otherwise going to be homeless, and let them have it at a reduced rent so they could be caretakers: someone had broken in while he and Caroline were in Tuscany. They have been there ever since, doing more damage then any number of burglars would have managed and in Emma's case being vile about Caroline daring to visit her own home; "Lady Muck" was what Emma called their benefactor's wife.
Anyhow; Ed also leased fifty acres from the Estate to keep his dairy herd on, and stupidly paid the rental for a year he didn't want after he sold the cows; he also had to give a year's notice the following year, because he didn't have the brain to go into arrears on the rent and get the land repossessed.
Nine acres (or it may have been hectares) christened Grundy's Field was bought by the Grundys with some windfall or other shortly after they moved back from Meadow Rise, and David let them have one acre (or maybe hectare) very cheap so that they had enough land to be allowed to have built a barn on it. Don't ask why David had land over there to let them have: it's at the far end of the village from Brookfield and surrounded by the Berrow Estate. Don't ask why Lynda knew the barn was there and felt obliged to complain about it as an eyesore; it is nowhere near Ambridge Hall, which is even further from Grange Farm than Brookfield is. For ages I thought Grundy's Field must be near Keepers Cottage, but it isn't: I finally found it on a map on the road towards Waterley Cross, near Grange Farm and nowhere near where the Grundys were living when they bought it.