We divided the cats into two groups, purely for identification purposes.

Firstly, there was the Garden Family which had started when The Cat brought her kittens into the garden for weaning, and then made it their home. Of course, in the early days, The Cat and her family constituted all of the Garden Family but, as feral females tend to settle into an area close to their food supply (to make life easier when they have kittens), other females started using the garden as their base and then bringing their kittens for weaning. So of course, they became part of the Garden Family.

This photo shows The Cat’s son Fred in the fields opposite. He was the only boy of the family and a real adventurer.

Next is T, who was an example of a kitten of a Visiting Cat who had decided to make his home in the garden. He was Visitor Cat’s son, born in the fields with his siblings. Visitor brought them to the food bowls in the drive and front path for weaning, and the kittens soon found their own way into the garden via the wall and olive tree. T and his twin sisters Cheese and Cracker became members of The Garden Family while their mother remained a Visiting Cat. The photo shows T in the fields at the side of the garden with an unidentifed orange-and-white cat – someone we did not recognise.

Despite making the garden their home, T and his sisters spent a lot of time out in the fields. In many ways, they were more at home there, having been born and raised there by their mother. This photo shows one of the girls in the fields after harvest (as Cheese and Cracker were identical twins, it’s impossible to say which of them it is).

Sundown (pictured in the next photo) was the daughter of She-ba, Visitor’s daughter and, although she became a member of The Garden Family, her roots were strongly feral and she was never completely comfortable with humans around. She much preferred to be in the fields, here photographed in the prickly pear shrubs which divided the fields into their sections.

And the second group was the Visiting Cats. These were cats whose homes were in the fields, who drifted in and out, eating mostly in the drive or in our front path. The garden was part of their territory, just somewhere they passed through; if they were hungry, they stopped to eat, much the same as they did in the drive or front path. But the garden didn’t mean any more than that to them.

This photo shows Muffin and Kiwi (probably!) in the fields on the opposite side of the road. This was very much their home turf, as it were, their territory, their land.

These two groupings of Garden Family and Visiting Cats did not mean that there was a divide between these cats, or that their areas were specific to them. Although the garden was the Garden Family’s base, they all spent time in the fields too (as you can see from the header photo which shows The Cat’s son, Blackfur, out in the fields), and were familiar with them. And, conversely, it was inevitable that some of the Visiting Cats would pass through the garden and occasionally spend some time there.

However we bracketed them, the cats roamed, adventured and hunted, following their feral instincts.