Mike Evans calls himself a “nerd about bricks”. When 15 members of the Conservation Society toured Glastonbury Reclamation on May 20, he lovingly showed them bricks made by the Down and Merrick families since at least 1811 at the two Glastonbury brickyards that thrived along Wells Road. These were still open in the 1930s but were gone by 1950.

  Glastonbury Reclamation’s stock of bricks is actually quite low, he said: they have to keep constant watch on demolition sites to stop workers from simply crushing materials — like the Coxley pub, which was pulled down too suddenly this spring.

  Clay roof tiles are abundant, though, and so are fine and fancy clay chimneypots. The yard has tiles in many varieties, including some with black or blue glaze. Yet John Merrick roof tiles are rare.

  Glastonbury Reclamation started in 2003 with a pine-stripping tank and soon expanded. The founders were Mike Evans and his son Simon, who were restoring two properties in Norbins Road (“making Victorian houses look like Victorian houses again”), and James Dash and his father, owner of Landmead Farm at the Northload Bridge roundabout, which is now the Glastonbury Reclamation yard.

  Big polytunnels provide dry storage for a cornucopia of furniture and curios — you can spend a happy hour nosing through.

  The yard appeared on television in Salvage Hunters and Antiques Roadshow, where a Scottish lady bought a quantity of old shoe lasts. For the film Far from the Madding Crowd, shot in Dorset and released in May, props people built a granary from the yard’s rustic doors, elm beams and (polystyrene!) staddlestones.

  For Mike Evans, Glastonbury Reclamation is a far cry from his previous life as a solicitor in the Gould & Swayne office in Glastonbury High Street.