HE'S not averse to a bit of tub-thumping for the sake of historic buildings and Griff Rhys Jones doesn't shy away from an architectural challenge. But what possessed him to buy a storm-battered old farm in the wilds of West Wales? He invited SAM BURSON around to see his hard work

IT'S not easy finding Griff Rhys Jones's newly refurbished, 18th century farmhouse. But it is in the epicentre of a fantastic place in which to get lost.

Normally stopping in a car park to get your bearings and not being able to ring anybody because there is no mobile signal would be a rather frustrating experience.

But somehow looking out past a lighthouse on Strumble Head, Pembrokeshire - arguably one of the most picturesque stretches of coastline in Wales - has a calming effect.

Then being approached by a nearby nature photographer, saying, "Psst! Would you have a look at this," and being able to watch a couple of seals go through a mating ritual, is just a bonus.

So, it is established then, that the actor and comedian's farm which, with persistence, can be found just outside the village of Trefasser, is in an extremely pleasant location.

And unlike the far more commercial southern side of the Pembrokeshire coast, the area is more sheep and cows than shorts and candy floss.

Farming has clearly been a part of the landscape for hundreds of years.

The area is littered with grand old farmhouses reminiscent of the days before modern agriculture, when manpower, and lots of it, was the force behind a successful farm.

As farm worker numbers have dwindled over the decades, the oversized buildings have fallen into various states of disrepair.

And Griff Rhys Jones has bought one - Trehilyn Farm - which, along with its adjoining farm, was on its last legs, but not beyond salvation.

The idea, which will inevitably cause some controversy, has been to transform the main building, at least initially, into a holiday let. But, as he explained, the reasons for doing so are anything but commercial.

He said, "It's not been done as an investment. It wouldn't be a business-like thing to do, to do it this way." In a five-part series for BBC Wales called A Pembrokeshire Farm viewers will see Griff's story unfold, from deconstructing the roof and replacing with individually hand-crafted Welsh slate ("probably the most expensive thing I've ever done," says Griff) to the final finish of white lime render to the stone walls.

For Griff - who has won awards for previous restoration projects which include London's Hackney Empire and a 1920s factory in Clerkenwell - part of the appeal was a return to his well-buried Welsh roots.

"I was born in Cardiff but at six-months-old my family moved away and I was brought up in Essex," he says.

"I'm a bogus Welsh person. I came to Wales while making Restoration but I didn't really know it very well at all.

"Then I started making (ITV drama) Mine All Mine in Swansea. Suddenly I was starting to feel more Welsh than ever before.

"With Trehilyn, I thought what I'd like to do is put some money from other projects back into Wales. But I'm very conscious of the moral question over what this farm constitutes and what its use can be.

"What we need to do is recycle, and that's what we're doing here, rather than letting it crumble. But there's endless argument about how it should be done."

The seeds for his current project were sown during a visit a few miles further east, and a meeting with a like-minded restoration enthusiast, and fan of architecture.

Griff said, "One morning we were making a programme about Welsh vernacular cottages just outside Lampeter with Greg Stevenson, who's a lecturer at Lampeter college.

"He's sort of an expert on vernacular architecture.

"He was showing me this cottage he had restored. It had been scheduled for demolition, but he'd put a thatched roof on it.

"Because I've been involved in Restoration, I've been involved in the principles of restoration. I've restored three houses myself.

"I was steeped in restoration, but like everybody else I've relied on builders to do it and relied on advice.

"The principles are quite easy to learn, but quite difficult to put in practice.

"Greg showed me how he stuffed gorse in the roof - insulation. He'd restored it on right principles, wanting to repair things rather than tear them down and start again.

"We did a piece on Restoration on vernacular cottages, and how they're still disappearing all over the Welsh countryside, which is a great disappointment to people who like this sort of architecture."

But he had not quite decided on any specific projects of his own in Wales until he was taken by an extremely run-down farmhouse belonging to the Price brothers in the window of a Fishguard Estate agent.

Griff added, "Literally, I think, the very next morning after being with Greg, I'm in Fishguard to film something in the Preseli Hills.

"I walk past the window of an estate agent, look in and there's the farm for sale.

"I had about half-an-hour before we started filming again and we drove out and stood here.

"Mr Price came out and quickly showed me the farm, and how to pick up a sheep which had fallen over, and the next thing I know I'm bidding (for it) in Fishguard.

"Jo, my wife, came down for the auction. It was like something out of Father Ted. The entire agricultural community in Pembrokeshire had turned out to see who would buy the farm."

Griff admits his purchase wasn't the culmination of a long-term plan, rather a case of being caught up in the moment.

"It was complete serendipity. I probably suffer from a bipolar disorder, and must have been in a very up mood.

"I was just around, and thought, 'This is great', when I looked in the window of the estate agent.

"I had no idea when I bought it we were 10 minutes from all this spectacular coastal scenery. It was an impulse buy."

The main farm building has been turned into two separate holiday lets - the first phase of a project which will eventually see many of the farm's countless smaller buildings also given the ultimate retro makeover.

But while Griff and his family are likely to stay occasionally, he is unlikely to be more than a visitor to the village.

He said, "Unfortunately there's no way I'd be able to live here.

"With the work I do, it would be impossible."

He admitted the location was not the easiest to reach, adding, "You get to Cardiff and realise you're still only half way there!"

So why put himself through what has now been nearly two years of hard work and toil?

"I bought it not because of the farm - although I'm willing to preserve the farmland - but because I was interested in the buildings.

"The buildings here were falling down and the difficulty is all of the prosperous farms in the past are not now prosperous enough to maintain their houses, especially if it's got a lot of buildings.

"Ninety per cent of the buildings on this farm are redundant because they don't meet EU hygiene standards, or don't have any function within modern farming. Even as tractor stores, the roofs are too low. You can see where they've bashed in bits of roof to get a tractor in."

Griff was aware of the implications of holiday lets, and that they can be viewed as unpopular.

But he stressed it was either that, or let the building fall into ruin. He concedes, however, that even with proving it with such an authentic new lease of life, a building can never be restored exactly to its original state.

He said, "I'm very conscious of the moral questions relating to the idea of what this farm can constitute and what it's use can be.

"I'm also conscious that there's a lot of people setting off to restore and do up buildings. They have the very best intentions but they want to do them right, but they don't necessarily get the best advice.

"They don't see the pitfalls and there's very little help.

"So I went, with Greg looking after me, to Martin Davies, who is a conservation architect who works for the National Trust. Then we saw Gill Wickenden, who's a conservation builder, and we set off to restore this place.

"The people who were living here had basically retreated to one room. Much of the rest was falling down and had become uninhabitable."

And while the farmhouse itself and its buildings are unlikely to be used again for agriculture, he has ensured the accompanying land continues to be farmed.

Griff said, "I now rent at a reasonable rate to my neighbour. He's a farmer. He was farming about 200 acres and he's now farming about 320 acres. He's now become a more viable farmer.

"But as a viable modern farmer what he doesn't need is a lot of farm buildings. The compromise we're making is that I'm taking the farm buildings.

"I still have ownership of the land which is useful to me because I want to make the land more aesthetically organic. I think that's what farmland should be."

Griff is convinced one of the main nails in the coffin of traditional Welsh farms was a sudden fear over food scarcity after the Second World War.

"It was during this time that they discovered that Britain did not produce enough food. That's why there were rations when we couldn't import anything.

"The Government then introduced a system trying to increase productivity.

"That meant they hacked up hedges, encouraged agri-business and monster farms.

"We had industrial farming.

"But they didn't allow for invention of phosphates and better fertilisers so we now have far more food than we have use for. This means an economic problem with the amount of land we've created."

He believes a serious and realistic debate is now needed about the future of the Welsh countryside, and the role of farming.

Griff said, "We have to make decisions about the future for the countryside in Wales.

"Some see it as an amenity, some as an ecological challenge, some as a place to visit and throw litter into, some want to walk in it. We all have a responsibility or an interest in it.

"I happen to believe that every bit of it needs to be approached with care. We need to avoid short-term economic policies or panic produced by global warming, like wind-farms in some of the most beautiful parts of the world here in Britain.

"If we allow that sort of short-term thinking then every 15 or 20 years we have a crisis. During the crisis we allow all sorts of planning applications, get rid of greenbelt and in 200 years we'll completely wreck everything.

"So we need to recycle, which is ecologically and ethically sound.

"As I said, what we're doing here is recycling. We're saying, 'Let's take this house and instead of allowing it to crumble away, let's restore it'."

And in recycling, he is sticking as closely as possible to the rules used by the first people to work on the house some 300 years ago.

"This house is being made liveable in by going back to the principles with which it was built, instead of using post Second World War principles which have generally been applied willy-nilly to Welsh houses.

"But one of the problems you have is that you want to integrate certain modern facilities into a house. We're not running an experiment in Luddism [an 18th century movement against machinery and technology]. We're trying to integrate these two things together.

"Certain fanatics in the restoration business say no building must be changed. I'm not a fanatic and believe they look good in the landscape because they were built out of it and the natural materials."

And Griff has come across many common misconceptions about just exactly what is traditional.

He said, "Some people may think it looks hideous because we've painted it bright red, but houses were traditionally painted bright red.

"We've used natural colours and finishes. They have a quality built into them like natural dies and for me have a quality to do with nature and the surrounding countryside.

"This is lime plaster on these stone walls. It allows the stone to breathe so the damp can get out.

"People nowadays generally like to do two things - they like to strip it off and make it stone. That was never a tradition, but they do it to look more rustic.

"They also like to strip all the paintwork and make it look wooden, to get to some sort of Swedish ideal of bare wood. But that's also not traditional either. People would have painted there.

"A lot of the programme is about how un-straightforward it is to restore the place.

"For example do we keep all the fantastic 60s wallpaper we've kept finding, layer upon layer?"

One of the biggest dilemmas came over the treatment of the roof.

Should it have been restored, using the traditional method, even if the traditional method seemed dodgy at best?

"The roof was a grouted roof. It's basically a layer of cement put on a failing slate roof.

"This is a very wet and storm-tossed part of country and around here when the slate starts to go, so rather than build it from new, you've got a layer of lime to fill in the cracks.

"Then you'd put water on it and tie it all together with barbed wire to stop a really heavy roof falling off the building."

His architect was keen on keeping the grouted roof, but the matter caused plenty of contention.

Griff said, "Greg comes along and says, 'This is one of the most marvellous cement roofs I've ever seen. We must repair and maintain it'. But the carpenter said, 'It can't be done. If you put another layer of cement on, it'll just collapse after six months'.

"So we discovered we couldn't have the original grouted roof. There was a lot of anguish, but I've learned to pass the buck quite early on, and I passed it over this.

"We came back and put these graded slates on. Each slate is a different size and hand-cut in order to be in keeping with what is probably the most expensive single thing I've ever done.

"And then Greg says, ''Let's stick all the concrete back on that'. It's an absolutely beautiful roof and it's brand new.

"There was a big argument about whether we should now concrete over this roof to restore it to how it was.

"They all told me I'd be lying in bed knowing I had a beautiful hand-made roof all covered up.

"So I've said I'll grout it in 100 years when it needs it."

He added, "Is it better to let the building fall down? I don't know. But there are plenty of buildings in Strumble Head which are falling down, and there's also plenty of demand for holiday lets, just as there is for hotels.

"It's not something I wanted to do to make money from - in that commercial sense this wouldn't be feasible."

Producer and director of A Pembrokeshire Farm, Simon Mansfield, reiterates that making money is not the issue.

"I wouldn't even like to guess how much money Griff has ploughed into this farm, but I think Trehilyn has been very lucky to have attracted him," says Simon, who originally comes from Caerphilly.

"It's difficult to imagine anyone else who would have taken a building like this, in a desperate state of repair, and dedicated this level of investment - in terms of both money and integrity - in this way."

A Pembrokeshire Farm is on Thursday at 7.30pm on BBC One Wales