WHETHER made from corrugated tin, wood or reclaimed iron, these simple little elevated rooms were once home to Hampshire’s shepherds.

Simple in design they often contained little more than a stool and a stove as farmers watched over their flock on the rolling hills of the downs.

They were frequently used as a place to store medicines and tools, to save workers traipsing back and forth to the downland with their heavy gear, but were also a place of refuge – a safe haven from the prevailing winds and rain.

Their thick iron wheels would allow them to be moved from field to field while farmers could cook all three meals of the day in their compact cooker.

Today these now-ramshackle huts can still be seen loitering in the corner of a field where they were once used a century ago.

But if you take a visit down to Curdridge you can see these derelict tin shacks beautifully restored and ready to use in whatever manner you wish.

Matt Plummer and Chris Tidman have taken it upon themselves to revitalise the traditional shepherds’ huts into something more modern and much more useful, transforming them into rooms for quirky B&Bs, offices or even little personalised garden retreats.

“They are the quintessentially English thing,” Matt says as he brushes his hand against the fine craftsmanship. “They got pushed to one side because of modern farming techniques.

“These huts we're once a common sight on many of the farms and estates all across the downs. Their main purpose was to house a shepherd, not only for the lambing season, but in general to tend to his flock of sheep as they were then used to propagate the land before modern fertilisers came into existence.”

Chris and Matt, who now operate as the Four Penny Workshop, met completely by chance when Matt was restoring an old hut.

Matt says: “I was made redundant from a long and boring laborious job and my hobby was doing up an old hut. Chris just happened to be walking by with a friend of his, we didn’t know each other or anything, he just saw what I was doing and took an interest. He said he had some spare time coming up that weekend and it just went from there.

“Chris is a bit of a furniture restorer by trade whereas I’m a bit of a handy-doer-sort-of-person. As a kid I grew up in Deane and my friend had one. It was something used for Sunday school classes.

“Chris grew up in Somerset and they had similar ones, different to those in Hampshire mind.”

Though the pair has only been going for a little over a year-and-a-half they have already managed to secure several projects, including personalised chicken coop restorations, and most recently a hut at the Queen Elizabeth Park for the South Downs National Park Authority.

“They had one there by Taskers, it was a bit battered and it’s going to be completely fitted out,” Matt adds. “They were going to change it into a hideous ice-cream parlour but we convinced them to return it to its proper former glory.

“There is a big push for them everywhere. The demand was there about 10 years ago but there seems to be another resurgence. Unlike gypsy caravans these are very simple. There’ll have cast iron wheels and inside, if you were lucky enough, it would have a stove. “Our main customers are women, I think they like the idea of something quite ornate at the bottom of their garden. Their husbands are less keen but then they see they have little stoves in and it’s a nice small enclosed space, where they can read their Hampshire Chronicle, so they end up saying ‘yes’.”