In memoriam of Mark Barden

In Memory of Mark Barden 12.10.1954 – 25.01.2023

My dear Mark passed away at home with his family around him. We had been married for 44 years. He leaves three sons: Gregory, Miles and Jonathan; a daughter, Emma, and seven grandchildren. He will always be in my thoughts.

The essence of Mark lay in his love of nature and the land. In his relatively short life of 68 years he managed to pack in a great deal. He enjoyed a successful career as a chartered surveyor leading to a partnership with Gerald Eve in London; a marriage to Jenny and raising four children; travelling the world both in a professional capacity and in pursuit of his unquenchable wanderlust; acquiring and running a farm in Dorset for the last ten years, and founding the Holnest herd of English Longhorn cattle and the Holnest flock of endangered Dorset Horn sheep.

Mark had an energy and zest for life that in his early years seemed unstoppable. His boyhood days were spent roaming the fields and woods around Elstree, and his grandfather, himself the son of a dairy farmer, encouraged Mark’s passion for keeping creatures of all kinds. Mark filled his first house in Harpenden with a menagerie of animals and exotic birds as well as children. He was an ardent ornithologist with an encyclopedic knowledge of bird identification, passionate about sailing and wildlife photography. He kept a boat on the River Orwell, took up scuba diving and, amongst many adventures, climbed Ol Doinyo L’Engai in Tanzania, a remote active volcano before it was partially destroyed by an eruption. After the end of the Cold War he helped set up an office for Gerald Eve in Poland, and took a keen interest in relations between Eastern and Western Europe and global politics in general.

Mark studied estate management at Reading University where he met Jenny who was studying law. His choice of subject had been inspired by the idea of managing an estate, though he was soon disabused of that as a realistic prospect! He applied for a position with Gerald Eve and remained with the firm for his entire career spanning 36 years.

Happily, the work that Mark was tasked with often involved travelling in the UK and abroad, and he soon developed a reputation for being adept at dealing with unusual and challenging subjects. That suited him well. He often remarked that he felt privileged to have been involved in some of the most interesting cases that a surveyor could ever hope to encounter. Business trips to places as diverse as Bahrain, Moscow and Cape Verde were complemented by private forays to wilderness areas: beyond the Arctic Circle to watch brown bears, or to the source of the Nile at Murchison falls to photograph the rare rock pratincole, or to the panhandle of the Okavango amongst many others.

In spirit he was fearless. When confronted by Masai warriors after becoming lost near the rim of the Rift Valley he offered water and was shown the way. When his Land Rover was commandeered by armed soldiers in Uganda he insisted that their freshly caught fish should be tied to the outside of the vehicle and they complied. In Belarus, on a business trip, he negotiated entrance to a factory for valuation with a general whose tanks were parked in the service yard. When illness got the better of him he never complained.

In the Eye of the Kite


You are here
In the eye of the kite that soars over Dogbury Hill
By the gate that you hung swinging open
In the trees that you planted about to burst into bud
You are here
At your desk
On the chair
In my bed
Everywhere

You are here
In the place where time slips a gear
And vivid memories pervade
A grey reality that fades
As you race past through the surf
On a hot beach in the sun
And I cannot catch up until you stop
And fall down laughing

Before our children were born
When we had nothing but one another

Now I hear you making the shelves
On which we both kept our shoes
His and hers
A section each
Listen to you telling the radio presenter
That he has no grasp of the truth
While the saw rasps
And the woodpigeons coo
Feel the marks in the wood

All that is sensed is past
Left in traces
Your fingerprints on the binoculars
That you took on all your trips
The smell of you in the boot
On which the cat rubs her cheek
The shape of you in the cushion
Where the dog curls into a ball
Your hand in the scrawl
Inside last year’s diary
Noting when the calves and lambs will be born
That you will never know
Or touch

But you are here
In the eye of the kite
By the gate
In the trees
In my love

Jenny Barden