The family living in the middle of the M62 motorway say their life is just like any other farm, even though cars zoom past them all day, everyday. People often wonder about the farm between junctions 22 and 23 near Huddersfield on the M62.
Some think the farmer wouldn’t leave when they built the road, so it ended up around his land. But the truth is not that simple. Paul Thorp, Jill Falkingham-Thorp, and their son John-William live at Stott Hall Farm. They are sheep farmers who care for more than 900 ewes and 20 Angus, YorkshireLive reports.
Their life was shown on TV on The Pennines: Backbone of Britain where Paul said he loves farming and spoke about how special it is to him.
He said: “To get an opportunity to take on a farm this size were once in a lifetime, so it’s my home now. It’s just everything.” “It’s just like any other farm really. You’ve got to know your land, know your job and plan around it.”
But he admitted: “The only thing is we’ve got six lanes of traffic through ours. It throws up its challenges – it’s very unique.”
Talking about the motorway, he said he wonders where everyone is going all the time and finds it hard to understand. On his sheep farm on the M62, one of Paul’s major challenges is when his sheep get loose.
This was highlighted in a 2022 documentary that featured his farm. The dry stone wallers become a crucial part of his solution for this modern problem.
In explaining why he values this method, he added: “As my grandad said, the stone in Yorkshire were put underneath Yorkshire so it could be used on top of Yorkshire. There’s nowt else that would last, if you put a concrete wall up here, it would just erode in no time.”
Speaking to the Sunday Times in 2017, Farmer Jill said: “When [Paul] asked me to live here, I was like, ‘Oh my God, really?’ It was tough at first.
“There was no bathroom upstairs and the traffic was so noisy. The windows are triple-glazed so it’s not so bad inside the cottage, but outside it can get loud.”
Now they’re used to the country’s fascination with the farm, which was actually saved when engineers discovered a geological fault beneath the farmhouse, making it was practical to build the lanes around the property than through it.
