Across the valley from where they live in Derbyshire, Sue Salisbury works the only other farm in the village, with her father and her husband, Roger. She says: "You have to work a lot harder for less return. You get some pleasure, but a big brother official is always in the corner, watching. You have to do what you are told." Abney, where the Chadwicks, the Salisburys and their animals live, has a population of fewer than 100 and is in on of the more beautiful corners of Derbyshire's Peak District. Charlotte Brontë used to visit nearby and found inspiration there for Jane Eyre. Across the valley from where they live in Derbyshire, Sue Salisbury works the only other farm in the village, with her father and her husband, Roger. She says: "You have to work a lot harder for less return. You get some pleasure, but a big brother official is always in the corner, watching. You have to do what you are told." Abney, where the Chadwicks, the Salisburys and their animals live, has a population of fewer than 100 and is in on of the more beautiful corners of Derbyshire's Peak District. Charlotte Brontë used to visit nearby and found inspiration there for Jane Eyre. But there is frugality too: Abney has no shop or pub, though it does have a community centre and a telephone box. It is a sought-after village for holiday homes, which may change hands for six-figure sums. That is why the Chadwicks' daughter, Claire, and her husband Robert and son Jack, who is nearly two, are still living at home with Viv and Andrew. Bellis, now 30, grew up on a farm in Devon and still keeps a few animals of her own. She offers free labour and mucking in, in exchange for freedom to snap away. She has spent much of her career so far chronicling disappearing ways of life in Britain and in the world's poorer countries. "The Chadwicks and the Salisburys," she says, "live and work in stunning surroundings. But if you get closer, the reality is not that pleasant. Look through the farm window and the people are tired of working for next to nothing. You can't eat beautiful scenery and sheep don't pay the bills if the prices you get at the market are what you got 20 years ago." Bellis and her 'subjects' all love their environment. But, she asks, while their farms may represent the wider population's dreams of rural life and our common heritage, at what price for the people who live an work on them? "The only reason small farms survive at all is because many hill farmers are as stubborn as the mule-faced sheep they breed", she says. "These farms have often passed on from one generation to the next. And so to be the one who gives it all up is not easy." Andrew Chadwick has contemplated auctioning the whole lot off. "That," he says, "would put money in my pocket, but the rest of me would be empty. People leave the city to walk in these hills, but I don't just want to be a national park attendant. Hill farming should be worth more than that to people, but it isn't." Sue Salisbury, who inherited the farm from her father, says the land in the Peaks has always been difficult to work. "We've been told to become more efficient, to produce more, to modernise, to survive. We've done that, but it isn't easy. I honestly think that we're no better off now than when my father was running it." Andrew Chadwick adds philosophically that if people can buy cheaper food from abroad, that's what they will do. His wife says that last year they might have given up, but grandson Jack came along. "And that was something worth carrying on for."				^ Back to Top