But Holden, the son of a child psychiatrist and academic, and from a line of Oxford scholars, has always ploughed his own counter cultural furrow, starting by shunning Balliol College for Emerson Agricultural College in Forest Row, West Sussex, which taught farming along biodynamic principals. When he arrived there in 1973 it was with a bunch of fellow communards, including his former wife Lou. Everyone around called them “the hippies on the hill”.