When I was a child this small back gate led to a very exciting area. The pathway is steep and the cobbles can be slippery when wet so take care when on a house and garden tour. This gate from the cobbled yard leads to what is left of the farmyard. The stable is still there but some of it has fallen down and the wooden back section has disappeared altogether. Fifty years ago it was very exciting to explore with ladders up into the lofts, peer through the holes for tossing down the hay and slits in the walls which we felt sure were for shooting at bush rangers. Maybe they were for ventilation. There was a tack room with a fire place and above that a room where the stable man lived which also had a fireplace. Stalls for horses, a room for a carriage, and in the back section another large cobbled room.
The whole farmyard was enclosed with stone walls, some brick, some mortared with sandstone coping and a long section now gone was of brown drystone. I loved collecting eggs from the fowl house, lifting the lid of the egg box and hoping there was not a hen sitting there. The stable had a section where a man milked a few cows and nearby my Father had a smoke house for smoking meat. Beyond this farm yard were paddocks where the cows spent the days with a few horses. There were fields further around the hill which were reached by a formed road called the cow lane. Most of the farmyard and fields are now only a memory because suburbia has encroached closer and closer.
Summerhome is only a fifteen minute drive from the centre of Hobart so it’s really quite amazing the estate of twenty five acres of rural landscape still existed within the city limits in 1972.
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