Shepherd’s hut, your highness? This is more like a palace!
Stained-glass windows, wool walls, bespoke tiles ... only the best for keeper of royal flock
SHE is the first woman to be put in charge of Prince Charles’s 650strong Scottish flock of sheep.
So it is only right that Charlotte Darwent should be given a palace among shepherds’ huts.
Revealed exclusively in the Daily Mail, the bespoke structure, which took 11 months to build, boasts stained-glass windows, sheep’s wool walls and hand-made tiles.
Miss Darwent, 27, who cares for the prince’s rare-breed sheep at his beloved Dumfries House in Ayrshire, told the Mail that she is delighted with her luxury pied-aterre in the fields.
It is not dissimilar to the £25,000 shepherd’s huts owned by David Cameron, one of which he reportedly used as a retreat to write his memoirs after stepping down as prime minister in 2016. He keeps a second hut at his third home in Cornwall.
Miss Darwent’s version was built by students on The Prince’s Foundation’s Building Arts Programme, run in collaboration with The Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust, a charity dedicated to supporting
excellence in British craftsmanship. The nine-month scheme was devised to nurture specialist practitioners in traditional skills such as woodwork, blacksmithing, thatching and stonemasonry.
The hut, which is 14ft by 7ft and is 8ft high, showcases artisan techniques including timber-framing, wool dyeing and encaustic tiles, an ancient method in which wax and pigment are fused onto the surface with heat.
The wool was dyed using lichen from trees on the Dumfries House estate and beetroot and blackberries from the walled garden. Other natural dyes included onion skins, fermented oak bark and amaranthus flowers, which impart a yellow colour.
The wool was then turned into thick strips of fabric to be used on the walls of the hut as natural insulation, keeping it cosy in the winter and cool in the summer.
The hut will not only be used by Miss Darwent – it will also become an education tool and showcase of the traditional skills taught by The Prince’s Foundation.
She said: ‘The students on the Building Arts Programme have done a wonderful job of crafting a traditional shepherd’s hut for me to use when needed.
‘Modern shepherds’ huts are a celebration of rural heritage style, which date back to the 1800s. Typically, carpenters or farmers on site would build these huts from found materials, so I think it’s really fitting that the students crafted the hut using traditional building skills and natural materials from the estate itself.’
Sarah Diver-Lang, from County Antrim, Northern Ireland, worked for a design company in Glasgow before enrolling on Charles’s programme to expand her repertoire.
She settled on a role within the eight- strong team that involved spinning, dyeing and weaving wool sourced from freshly shorn sheep on the estate. Miss Diver-Lang added: ‘The estate is such a rich source of plant life that can produce beautiful dyes.’
Simon Sadinsky, executive director of The Prince’s Foundation, said: ‘Our students are given a chance to not just hone their own skills but, through engaging with other trades, get a better understanding of how they fit into the wider built environment.’
Miss Darwent, who works with her two dogs, Dot and Gill, was appointed shepherdess by Prince Charles in 2018. She said at the time: ‘It’s a very male-dominated world. But to me it was just what I wanted to do, so I had to throw myself in at the deep end and go for it. ‘I had an outdoorsy family with lots of animals. When I left school, I didn’t want to be in an office – I definitely wanted to get into sheep. It just felt right.’ She added: ‘Particularly on a blizzard day on the quad bike, winters here can be quite brutal, and even though you’re feeling so cold, you’ve got to keep going and get round all the sheep. But I wouldn’t want to do anything different.’ Charles, who is Great Grand Steward of Dumfries House, takes a keen interest in shepherding at the stately home he saved for the nation in 2007. He has also championed the vocation through his Campaign For Wool initiative. The prince is also patron of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, and he sees his Ayrshire farms as crucial to the future of his chosen native breeds – Scotch mules, cheviots, Suffolk crosses, Lleyn crosses and border Leicesters. The plan is to breed them and improve the stock, thus preserving the gene pool and saving them for future generations. ‘They are quite flighty and wild, so you need a dog to pen them up – and some patience,’ Miss Darwent admitted.
‘The sheep are quite flighty and wild’