SIR,

A lot of people have been watching and waiting to see what Monmouthshire County Council's intentions were for The Meend at Penallt after Arthur and Ros Edmonds, the last tenants to farm there, retired.

Would it be re-let to a local person in need of a good stock farm to provide for his or her family? Would it be sold off for housing? Now, finally we know.

It is to go to Kate Humble and her husband Ludo Graham. Their plans for The Meend will breathe new life into the old farmstead. I wish them well.

More of a worry is the process by which it has come to the Grahams.

The council's lack of transparency and failure to invite other interested parties to pitch is shameful, but no real surprise.

Last weekend, for old time's sake, I took a wander around the farm.

I'd not been back for more than 30 years, since my father's dispersal sale, before the tenancy was handed on to Arthur and Ros.

Up till then The Meend had been tenanted by two successive generations of the same family, who were born, reared and made a living there. It's not that long ago, certainly within my early memory growing up there in the 1950s, that it was a traditional mixed farm using traditional crop rotations – rising potatoes, picking field peas, stooking wheat and barley and pitch-forking the hay to be trailered off to the rickyard as winter fodder for the sheep and cattle.

My Auntie Winnie, now 90, learned to make cheese at The Meend, taught there by her mother.

We also both remember just as clearly, perishing, bleak mid-winters in the damp and draughty farmhouse before electricity and mains water were connected.

There were days when it was the archetypal rural idyll. It was also very hard.

Then there was no choice. Nowadays there is.

My hope is that The Meend will continue to be stewarded sympathetically in the tradition that stretches back through the Edmonds' and my own family's tenure and beyond.

For full letter, see this week's Monmouthshire Beacon