It was all about the babies in Lark Rise this week. Whether or not to have them, wishing you could if you can’t, thinking you were when you weren’t, what to do with them when you’ve got them, and wondering if you did the right thing all those years ago. And in among all that, a huge dollop of the kind of homespun wisdom for which Lark Rise is becoming (in)famous.

The newcomer dropping his cat among the Candleford pigeons this week was Fisher Bloom (Matthew McNulty), newly arrived ironmonger with the commission to build Candleford’s new clock, courtesy of Mr Dowland. He takes an immediate fancy to Miss Laura, and who can blame him? Meanwhile his boss is still trying to find a way to tell Dorcas of his true feelings, which he wraps up in endless discussion about the clock, and whether it’s going to be ostentatious enough.

Dorcas, on the other hand, is busy looking after the youngest of the Timmins brood, Annie. This both to give Emma a break, and to satisfy her broodiness, albeit only temporarily. The more permanent solution to her parental desires, and his clock, remain strangely outside of Dorcas’ consciousness. But Dorcas isn’t the only one in whom young Annie stirs the maternal pot. Poor Ruby Pratt, with no prospect on any horizon, has to once again grit her teeth against the realisation that a wistful glance at another woman’s child is as close as she’s likely to get to motherhood. And it seems there’s a barrier to Margaret’s maternal machinations too, in the shape of her betrothed Thomas himself, and his determination not to be a father.

But like all obstacles placed before Lark Rise and Candleford folk, this one can be resolved with a few minutes’ straight talking. Dorcas learns that Thomas’s reluctance stems from having looked after an entire menagerie of younger siblings. Half a day’s reflection on the silliness of allowing his childhood experiences to decide the path of his adult life, together with the chance gurgling of his name from the general direction of Annie, is enough to change Thomas’s mind, much to Margaret’s delight.

So Emma gets her chance to do cartwheels in the lane and lie in the long grass with Robert one more time, Dorcas and Thomas learn something about themselves, Fisher receives Alf Arless’s blessing to tell Laura how he feels, and Minnie discovers that you can’t get pregnant through having lax morals.

And across all that gently unfolding drama are the sleepy rolling fields, lanes and hedgerows between Lark Rise and Candleford, where the sun always shines and the air is filled with the buzz of the bees, the smell of warm hay and the dandelion seeds floating dreamily past. In such a sedate and relaxed idyll, they’d better make sure that new clock runs as slow as the rest of their lives.