A £1.3 MILLION “golden egg” is at the centre of a renewed and bitter Appeal Court battle between an aging farming couple and their estranged daughter – dubbed the “Cowshed Cinderella”.

Eirian Davies, 46, was repeatedly assured by her parents, Tegwyn and Mary Davies, now in their 70s, that she would ultimately step into their shoes and take over the family’s thriving Henllan Farm, Whitland, and its herd of pedigree Holstein cows.

And in May 2014 three Appeal Court judges ruled that a stake in the thriving 182-acre farm was due to her for the years of low-paid toil she put in.

Miss Davies has told how she missed out on going to Young Farmers’ Club dances with her two sisters as a teenager because she had to “stay at home with a muck fork” , tackling her farming chores.

She worked on the family farm for over 25 years, although with sporadic breaks over the years.

“They always told me that the farm would be left to me,” Miss Davies told an earlier court hearing.

“Even on my birthday, when the other girls were having things, they would say – ‘you will have the damn lot one day, it will all be yours’,” she said.

Her father would regularly warn her “not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg” if she complained about her meagre wages, she added.

Until she reached the age of 21, Miss Davies was paid nothing at all for her work on the farm and, after that, there was a period when she was paid just £15-a-day for milking the cows, although sometimes she received more.

She claimed she could have ‘made a better life elsewhere’, but her 75-year-old father and mother, 76, insisted she had earned a fair income during her stints working on the farm, also being provided with free ‘bed and board’ and other benefits.

Describing her as ‘a self-employed herdswoman’, they argued she would have done no better financially had she worked away from the farm.

In 2009, Miss Davies was shown her parents’ draft will, which left the lion’s share of the farm to her.

However, the couple later made changes to their bequests and proposed placing the farm in trust for the benefit of all three sisters equally.

Miss Davies had a ‘passionate interest in pedigree milking cows’ and, by 1989 when she turned 21, she was the only sister left at the farm, ‘her sisters having departed to follow other paths’.

And, when she left the farm to work elsewhere for a while, her father begged her to return.

The bitter legal dispute was finally sparked in August 2012 following an “altercation” in the milking parlour – after which Miss Davies’ parents launched an unsuccessful bid to evict their daughter from Henllan Farmhouse.

Later on, Judge Milwyn Jarman QC ruled Miss Davies was entitled to a beneficial interest in the family’s lucrative farming business, prompting her parents to challenge that ruling in the Appeal Court.

But in May 2014 Lord Justice Floyd dismissed the couple’s appeal, ruling that Miss Davies had received “less than full recompense” for her contribution to the farm.

The appeal judge concluded: “This is in many ways a tragic case. The bitterness between the parties was such that each had few, if any, good words to say about the other.”

After the parents’ appeal was rejected, the case was sent back to Judge Jarman to put a figure on the amount of compensation due to Miss Davies.

He awarded her £1.3 million for her share of the family farming business in February 2015 at the High Court in Cardiff, triggering her parents to mount a fresh appeal.

The case returned to the Appeal Court on Tuesday this week (Apr 26) as Mr and Mrs Davies’ legal team launched their attack on the judge’s findings.

The couple’s QC, Simon Fancourt, claimed the £1.3 million pay-out would be “hugely disproportionate to any detriment Eirian incurred in reliance on representations that were made”.

The “representations and assurances” given by her parents were “general and non-specific” in the early days, said the barrister, including such sentiments as, “it’ll all be yours one day” and “don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg”.

He said Judge Jarman had found that the first time the couple made any substantial “explicit representation” about inheritance was in 2009 when Miss Davies was shown a draft of their wills, bequeathing the farm to her.

Mr Fancourt said that Judge Jarman unfairly “worked on the basis that there was an expectation of inheriting the whole lot”.

“He gave too much weight to the expectations,” said the barrister.

Lord Justice Patten, Lord Justice Underhill and Lord Justice Lewison, who are hearing the case at London’s Appeal Court, are expected to reserve their judgment to a later date.