A Wharfedale woman has turned her challenging move to a “ramshackle old cottage” in the middle of the woods into her first book.

Graphic designer Karen van de Bospoort and her husband, Tony, bought their house at Far Row, off Cabin Road, at Pool-in-Wharfedale, back in 1981 – and then had to work hard for ten years to turn it into a home.

The 53-year-old has drawn upon those “long hard days of DIY restoration” to create a personal memoir, A Tunnel of Leaves, which she has just self-published as a paperback after having it produced as an e-book earlier in the year.

She said: “The book is about setting up home in a dingy, ramshackle old cottage buried deep in beautiful, natural woodland on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales - in fact, in Pool.

“I have written it as a personal memoir, treating long hard days of DIY restoration as comical adventures to enthuse and delight anyone who is about to take a similar route.

“If, as a couple, we can wade through all the squalor, mishaps and destruction and come through unscathed, then anyone can do it.

“And of course added to all that were the joys of discovering all the English wildlife that exists right on our doorstep.”

Karen, who used her design skills to create and illustrate the book's cover, will be handing out flyers publicising the work – of which more details can be found at karenvande bospoort.com – around Otley and Pool in the coming weeks.

She has already begun work on a second book, a novel revolving around a young girl growing up in the 1950s with severe mental problems.