It's not just roasting – there's much more you can do with chestnuts

I was delighted, while on a writing retreat in Umbria last month, to get the opportunity to watch an elderly couple manoeuvre a giant vacuum around their haphazard chestnut orchard, followed by their furious sheepdog.

- Felicity Cloake

The fallen crop was sucked into a giant fan that spat their bristly jackets back out on to the ground, and the nuts then went to be sorted by other family members on a conveyor belt in the barn - the good ones to be sold in the shell, the less perfect specimens swiftly dropped into a bucket for processing.

Later in the week, a lorry turned up in the village square to pick up bags from other small local producers, and that evening I roasted a pan of chestnuts on the fire with new appreciation, while bemoaning the disappearance from the streets of London of the chestnut sellers of my childhood.