A MAN who paid £30,000 for a shack on top of a hill says he has seen it shoot up in value to £1 million – but he is refusing to sell.

Richard Hayward, 59, moved onto the site that consisted of a run-down wood yard and some World War Two Nissen huts in 1970. In 1991 he got the opportunity to buy the land he had been renting and splashed out £30,000.

But now, after winning planning permission to build a bungalow, he says the two acre site at Bulbarrow Hill near Blandford, is worth 33 times what he paid for it.

Mr Hayward runs the saw mill there with his two grown up sons.

The wooden tumbledown shack that is his home has electricity and a well is used to draw water.

But despite the value of the land he lives and works on, he couldn’t bear the place to change.

He said: “We paid just under £30,000 for the two acres to include the old wartime radar station, the NAAFI building and the ancillary buildings plus the right to cut wood in another 20 acres.

“Soon after we got planning permission to build a bungalow on the site we were offered over £500,000 for the freehold but there is no way we would sell.

“Today £1m would be nearer the value but I still wouldn’t want to move.

“I couldn’t bear to see the site destroyed with the old buildings demolished and the wildlife disturbed.”

Mr Hayward moved his young family onto the rented land in 1970 despite there being no proper living accommodation at the time. He worked off the land, cutting and axing logs and producing fences and rails for local farmers and pit props for mines.

After marrying his second wife Barbara in 1985 he was offered the chance to by the land and the ancillary wartime buildings in 1991.

He added: “We were granted planning permission a few years ago to replace the shack with a modern bungalow but soon after that Barbara succumbed to cancer and I was left alone.

“Within days of getting planning permission offers to buy poured out of the mail sack. The money that was bandied about was ridiculous.”