The Swallows

When we started thinking about what to name our wedding barn, plenty of ideas were suggested. Ed and I both enjoy a good discussion and neither of us is short of an opinion, particularly when it’s something we care about.

Whilst Tockington Park is our home, our address and the name of the estate where we live and farm, it wasn’t my first choice for the business. For me it had to be Swallow Barn.

I adore swallows. Barn Swallows (Hirundo rustica). For me they are the spirit of perseverance and determination.

These little birds have wonderful folklore attached to them; a swallow nesting in your barn was traditionally considered good luck and seeing the first swallow of spring was thought to bring good fortune.

Our swallows return to Tockington Park year after year. They fly more than 6,000 miles from southern Africa, crossing the Sahara Desert and somehow finding their way back to the very same farm buildings where they nested the year before. They arrive ready to pair up, nest and start the next generation. In a summer a pair of swallows can have up to three broods of chicks.

The first swallow of the year is always recorded in my diary and shared with a handful of equally enthusiastic friends.

It’s with elation that I watch the swallows dance over the fields and around the farm buildings. Some are obviously hunting, flying low over the fields after the insects, gathering food for their hungry young. But it’s the others that enthral me.

Their aerial acrobatics remind me of the Red Arrows. Twists, turns and impossibly tight loops as they mirror one another in flight. I like to imagine it is a parent teaching its young how to fly. Perhaps it is a practical lesson. Or perhaps it is simply for the sheer joy of being alive.

I moved to Tockington Park in April 2015. Why April? Well, I was a city girl and Ed knew that it would be impossible not to fall in love with this place in the spring and how much we would enjoy our summer here. By the time I came to my first winter on the farm I was hooked… a city girl no longer and I was able to hunker down by the log fire and endure my first harsh winter in the countryside. I knew that spring would return and the heralds of spring… the swallows. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I moved here at the same time of year as the swallows arrive.

The swallows were used as our deadline for completion of the barn renovation project this year. We stood looking up at the barns in early January and I asked John, our builder, who is also a farmer, ‘It will be finished by the time the swallows are back, won’t it?’. As it turned out the swallows were back on 6^th April 2026… and the build project wasn’t quite finished. No matter, the swallows were back and I noted with interest they were a whole week later than when they arrived in 2025.

As we’ve brought the barns back into use for people, we have been sure to put up new nests for the swallows and, far from declining, their numbers have actually grown over the 5 years the build project has been underway. This is their home, they return each year to the place they were born, their incredible internal navigation steering the course home.

A swallow has long symbolised a safe return home. For centuries sailors used swallow imagery because swallows always find their way home. There is an old maritime tradition that sailors earned swallow tattoos to symbolise miles travelled and the hope of returning safely.

So for me I was adamant the whole business should centre on the swallows. And certainly, our initial thoughts were that we’d be targeting weddings and celebrations from April to September, very much mirroring the time of year when you will see the swallows here at Tockington Park.

As we’ve thought more carefully about the business we want to build, it became clear that it was about much more than weddings. It’s about the wider estate, the cottages where guests can stay throughout the year, the landscape, the farming, the wildlife and experiences people can enjoy here. It’s also about the biodiversity projects we’re working on and our long-term stewardship of this place. Gradually, even I had to admit that Tockington Park was the name that best captured everything we were trying to create.

However, the compromise is that our majestic old stone threshing barn, the centre of the building conversion works, whose stone walls we’ve left comparatively untouched and whose roof we took off and carefully restored three summers ago, this stone barn was to be Swallow Barn.

And if nothing else, it provides an excellent explanation for when a swallow swoops in to be part of your wedding ceremony. Of course it’s here to celebrate with you. This is, after all, Swallow Barn.