The owners of a popular family business on the outskirts of Lisburn that was the scene of a devastating early morning fire a year ago made their long-awaited return this week.
One year on, the business has quite literally risen from the ashes as it threw open its doors to customers for the first time earlier this week. "All I could see were flames coming from the back of the building, which was horrifying and very frightening. I ran down as quickly as I could but at that stage the fire had caught hold."
"We were very fortunate that the actual tea room, new orangery and clothes shop were not affected too much and could be fixed up quite quickly." "There were some very dark days along the way when we thought we'd never get to this day but we got there. We faced some delays in the rebuilding process with sourcing materials due to the war in Ukraine but we had a great bunch of faithful tradesmen who did a brilliant job and made our reopening possible.