Read the diaries of the Thorburn and Macgregor sisters and you might wish to escape for a rural break back to the 1890s. Sure there was dusting, sweeping and many other household duties to do, but daily home baked treats by Kate and Tot would be there too, lingering in the air, egging you on. Washing day was certainly harder but it was a team effort and affectionately called ‘the water picnic’ as it took place outside beside the orchard. In the evenings they would relax reading Ruskin aloud in the cooler months, knitting or crocheting on the veranda in summer.

As time passed, technology slowly modernised their lives while social customs and the household changed, but much of the communal patterns of living, first laid down in the 1880s and 1890s, were repeated by each following generation.