Ashgrove is four hundred acres of dairy and arable outside Wells, farmed by the same family since 1954. In 2024 they converted three barns into holiday lets and opened the yard two days a week. Every reference they brought to the first meeting was a visitor attraction — tractor rides, a café with a mascot, a homepage full of exclamation marks. None of it was them, and the herd would still be calving on open days.

Shooting the farm in February

We took the wordmark from the stencilled lettering on the feed sacks in the grain store, and the palette off the yard in winter: wet concrete, galvanised steel, the green of a wrapped bale. The first shoot ran in February, before anything was in leaf. Muddy gateways, the vet’s van, the herd indoors. Three more days followed across the year, so the site would have something honest to show in any month somebody landed on it.

The site now tells people what will actually be happening the week they arrive — which field is being cut, whether the lambing shed is open, when the parlour runs. Enquiries rose 62% over the first eight months. The picture library covers four full seasons, and the family top it up themselves on a borrowed 35mm lens.

The booking form we resisted

Our first route kept booking off the site entirely, on the theory that a phone call would filter out anyone expecting a petting zoo. That held for a fortnight. It filtered out everybody, including the two couples who eventually took the barns for a week in August, so we built the calendar we had spent a meeting arguing against. The gate sign stayed hand-painted.