Nobody expects, when they set out on the journey of a house move, for it to take one month short of two years.

Yesterday we finally completed on the end point of our house moving journey. We are not where we expected to be, but there were times when we had no idea what or where the outcome of our relocation would entail.

Of course the Pandemic played a massive part in making the whole process more complicated but in a strange twist Medieval history was also responsible.

In 1066 William the Conquerer gave his loyal warrior Robert the Bastard considerable chunks of land in Devon and Cornwall as a reward for victory in the Norman Conquest of England. Unusually the land has stayed in the same family since 1066.

Unknown to us, the house we ultimately planned to buy was on a patch of this land, ordinarily this would have complicated things a little. In our case it complicated things a lot when the current descendant, the 8th Earl of Mount Edgecombe died just two weeks before we were supposed to move. The house moving rule books don’t really have a legal strategy or flexibility for such an event, beyond just giving up and walking away from the situation. With the co- operation and a lot of trust between ourselves and the sellers of the house (but not the land) we opted for a homemade solution and rented the house for three months while the legal teams were able to catch up with the paperwork. Sometimes risks have to be taken and yesterday the paperwork was in order and the house became ours, the land transfer will catch up with us later.

Last night we celebrated with English Champagne, anything French seemed a little inappropriate as the events of 1066 had created such a massive wrinkle in our recent lives.