TRADING IN TRAGEDY

‘Reading the letters felt like I was throwing open a window to the past’

My late thirties saw me standing at a crossroads, having learnt that my wife and I wouldn’t be able to have children. I’ve always felt that family is a harbour, a place of shelter during storms, but also the embarkation point for great adventures – and now I found myself cast adrift in the middle of the ocean. So while my contemporaries threw themselves into the all-encompassing business of raising young families, and looked to the future, I turned to face the past.

I knew very little about the paternal side of my tree. My Dad, an only child, had died in 1973, aged 38, and my grandfather had died a few months later, so I was four when I inherited the crumbling ancestral home at Temple Sowerby in Cumbria. This was a 17th-century farmhouse on to which a