A flatulent blast shatters the calm of an English country garden. It sounds as if the earth itself is bellowing, but there’s a more prosaic explanation. Swathed in cerise robes that contrast wildly with the spring lawn, Tibetan monks are practising the dung-chen, an elaborately decorated three-metre horn.

Since 2003, the Tashi Lhunpo UK Monastery Trust’s headquarters has been the English home of Jane Rasch, an effusive advocate of Tibetan culture who used to teach English in Dharamsala, the northern Indian town dubbed “Little Lhasa” because of its thousands of Tibetan refugees. On this, the eighth UK visit of the Tashi Lhunpo (“Heap of Glory”) Monks, she is playing host to eight of their number. Their own base is Bylakuppe, the southern Indian site of a new monastery since 1972, when the order followed its patron the Dalai Lama into exile from Tibet’s second city of Shigatse.