Writer, restaurateur, broadcaster and Chair of the School Food Trust, Prue Leith moved to Oxfordshire, southern England, more than 30 years ago with her husband, the writer Rayne Kruger, who died in 2003. She lives in Chastleton, a small village with a 12th century church near Moreton-in-Marsh on the Gloucestershire border.

I moved to the Cotswolds in 1976 because I had two young children and anybody who has had two-year-olds in a London supermarket will understand why. At the time Leith’s restaurant was selling 36 portions of duck a night. I fondly imagined I could run a duck farm and wanted to buy a place in the country. Unfortunately, to make a profit doing that you need to be Bernard Matthews and I wasn’t quite ready for The Good Life. I worked out I would lose about 42p on each portion, so we settled for the decorative element of farming and bought a five-acre place with someone else’s cattle grazing nearby.