As reward for waiting while I fed and mucked out the fattening porkers, the dogs were allowed to determine our walk this morning. Lifting their noses to scan the day’s news, they chose the footpath towards neighbouring Castle Combe. This route is best enjoyed early without the “madding crowd”. It climbs gently alongside hazel hedges, twitching with invisible activity, before levelling high above the river.

It’s called Rack Hill, named apparently from the practice of laying out drying cloth from the once-worked Long Dean mills. We grazed it years ago, but neglect has left it so overgrown that the new landowner is endeavouring to reclaim it with a flock of Soay sheep. Goat-like in looks and appetite, they’re tasked with restoring biodiversity to the monoculture of brambles. At least they’ve plenty to eat. Unless it rains, we’re about a week away from feeding hay to our cattle in a grass-growing season.

We’re halted by a 10ft barrier, livestock and pedestrian gates within one metal frame. Solid, manufactured to last, it’s the ultimate in farming utility – and I really don’t like it. The appearance, noise, handling – it’s soulless and abrasive.

By contrast, lying dumped in a wood across the valley, there’s an old wooden field gate, and now, as antidote, I go and seek it out. It rests among the wilted ground elder, dressed today with yellow strands of withered garlic like jaded tinsel. The left-hand side (but not the right) is softly mossed and there are three iron bolts down a central strut as neat as waistcoat buttons. I feel its nicks and dents, rough whorls and smoothly darkened grooves. There are blacksmith’s brackets, a reminder of a time when rural life sustained a multitude of trades. It’s so much more than just a gate – an artefact, a record, a habitat. It connects me to things that the impermeability of metal precludes.

I have always found its abandonment poignant: a careless forgetting of boots that scraped, stock that was surveyed and children who clambered. But I see now that it’s chained to a timber, and beside that is an end of what must have been a drystone wall. Not discarded then, but fallen. It seems a more honourable demise.