Serendipity took me there. A new route hastily found as it was getting dangerously close to my son’s Saturday morning football match kick-off – and the railway crossing was closed.

How can it be that we have lived a couple of villages away for many years and yet never been there? A place which mirrors other well-loved haunts from my life. Shades of Montana tumbledown barns came rolling back to me, the worn bungalows of Snettisham beach, fisherman's huts, my grandfather’s aircraft hangar – and my own studio. All embodied in this one rundown barn were places, people and times of my life that mean so much to me.

And how funny that amidst the family rush to get somewhere else, I knew I had found the place I wanted to paint.