Eco Village People

Three years ago the Government of Wales enacted a rather extraordinary piece of legislation. Buried within a Technical Advice Note to the updated Planning Policy of Wales was introduced the concept of "One Planet Developments" into law. The idea is to encourage those who want to live their lives as if we have just one planet (which the sharp-eyed amongst you will know, is actually true) rather than as if we have three planets-worth of resources (which is how most of us in Britain live), by allowing people to live off the land in a self-sufficient and environmentally low-impact kind of manner. 

Can't people already do this? Well yes if they happen to own a mixed smallholding, which these days is well out of the price-range of nearly everyone. The difference with One Planet Developments (OPDs) is that you can buy a piece of agricultural land, around ten times cheaper than residential land, and then build your own house on it using local materials.  The catch is that you have to show to the local council in great detail exactly how you plan to live off the land. Within five years you are expected to be getting 65% of your food needs from it, as well as most of your energy for heating, cooking and warmth, and sufficient income from some kind of land-based business (such as selling your fruit and veg, running basket-making courses, etc) to keep you afloat. The other catch is that local councils are not falling over themselves to grant permission for OPDs.

The eco-village Lammas where I have been staying this past fortnight was set up in response to a similar policy in Pembrokeshire in West Wales that slightly predated the national One Planet Development version, and in fact helped to shape it. There was a long tortuous battle to gain planning permission for Lammas which they eventually got on appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. They are three and a half years into their five year plans now; apparently some are well on track to hitting their targets, others less so, but there is cautious optimism that on balance Lammas will meet them and be allowed to continue. 

Very unusually there was only one attendee for last Saturday's Lammas tour - me. I could bend the ear of Paul Wimbush, the leading proponent of all things OPD, for an entire hour as he showed me round which was very useful as I am using this year to weigh up whether to go this route on my bit of land. One key bit of advice he had was regarding the number of people my plot could support, which he believed could be no more than two or at a stretch three people, based on its size and topology. This of course would limit the type of community that could form there, as I had been thinking more in terms of five or six people, purely from the social angle.

It's been a privilege this last fortnight to have been a small part of this vital experiment at Lammas, which in practical terms has meant helping Nigel put a sloped roof on his barn extension. I'm proud to say we did it. The four heavy wooden rafters were cut to size with an angled top surface, lifted on top and slotted into their chiselled-out holes, ten long batons laid and nail-gunned cross-wise over them with a sheet of felt material inbetween, and then large OSB chipboards carefully cut to size and nailed on top of that; the whole she-bang tightly covered temporarily with recycled plastic sheeting as the tiles are not ready to go on yet. Amazing how a single sentence can boil down seven days of ingenious problem-solving and hard labour! 

On Sunday I head back home to my caravan in Snowdonia to find out what Spring has been doing to the plantlife there and to begin to prepare the soil for growing food. I feel better equipped after these two weeks with people who are several years into doing it. It is certainly no picnic, I've heard many grumbles from people here as they chafe against the daily routines of feeding animals, the impact of the turbulent weather systems on their gardens and the intrusion of council officers into their living arrangements and financial affairs, but one thing is for sure, it is an intriguing and important alternative to the consumerist and non-sustainable lifestyle of the typical Westerner. 

The Lishman's plot

If I Had A Hammer

This week's message comes to you from the wild west of Wales, the dark heart of Pembrokeshire, from a tent on the side of a hill perfectly situated to welcome all the howling winds and raging gales that turn up from the Irish Sea wondering where to start the party. I am spending a fortnight here at the family home of Nigel, Cassie and their three kids, volunteering my time to do whatever needs doing in return for food and a warm welcome. Cassie is away this week so like any normal family the children are playing up, trying to wear down dad's defences and get themselves treats. The only unusual thing really about this family is that they live in a recently established eco-village called Lammas and so are trying to live off the land, off-grid, along with eight other residences.

The Lishmans have five acres of what was simply a big heavily-grazed field with a small conifer wood at the top. Over the three years they have been here it has been transformed into an attractive smallholding with a timber and straw bale roundhouse for hanging out in, an A-frame roundwood barn, a greenhouse made of lime-clad cob, a large vegetable garden and fledging fruit orchard, hundreds of coppiced willow stumps for their basketry rods business, a huge pit which apparently will become a swimming pool one day, a tiered grey-water system, a compost toilet under a canvas pyramid, several ponds, and various chickens, rabbits and ducks, the latter which waddle free all day getting under your feet in an endearing manner, although they get almost aggressively attached to you when you're out throwing feed to the chickens. Nigel and Cassie have clearly been very busy, so busy in fact that they haven't got round to building their actual house yet - they still sleep in a yurt.

Having volunteers stay with them must help a bit to keep things moving forward; certainly I've had no shortage of work thrown in my direction. The main focus of operations at the moment is the barn extension which will provide a solar-heated shower and a cubby-hole for visitors to kip in. The wooden frame for the extension is already in place but it lacks walls and a roof. Until Wednesday it also lacked a stable footing on the southern edge where the ground slopes away but this now has a dry stone wall made of slate below it helping to keep the foundations firm. Luckily it wasn't just me building this wall or I would never have a good night's sleep again wondering when I'd hear about the great eco-barn disaster; I was accompanied by two others, both of whom knew a thing or two about putting one stone on another in a stable manner. By the end of the day I was beginning to feel like I was actually helping rather than hindering. Probably a horribly flawed misconception I know.

Yesterday Nigel and I began selecting the three cross-beams for the roof from a large pile of timber he happened to have lying around, and cutting them down to size; soon enough we'll be whipping them up the scaffolding and slotting them into the roof frame. And whenever it rains, which it does fairly often it has to be said, I go inside the barn and carry on painting their yurt's many wooden struts, and myself to a large degree, with a red waterproofing tincture. 

Nigel is an ever-flowing fount of knowledge about many things, environmental, structural, social. I've learned a great deal from him in just these few days. Our first conversation upon my arrival was about the best design of a compost toilet. He's been very willing to answer all my questions about what it's like to live here and how it all works despite having to fend off constant demands and emotional outbursts from his offspring. I've discovered that all nine dwellings at Lammas are now provided with a decent amount of 240V electrical power from their own hydro-electric turbine; the Lishmans also have a small solar panel feeding batteries for their 12V LED lighting. Their water comes from a communally-owned spring, fresh enough to drink although they normally put it through a gravity-filter just in case. A wood-stove can heat the roundhouse but it doesn't take much heating, being incredibly well insulated. They are not self-sufficient in food but grow a fair amount during the summer months. 

Tonight I'll be heading to the "Hub Social", a weekly gathering at Lammas' communal roundhouse, and tomorrow I get a tour of the whole site by Paul Wimbush whose brainchild it all is, so stay tuned for the next installment of Eco-Village News.

Choose Your Own Welsh Adventure

First the bad news. The Brigand's Inn, my local hostelry on which I rely for its slow-but-steady WiFi connection and was eyeing up as a potential customer for any fresh produce I might happen to grow, is closing down in two weeks due to some dispute over business rates. They don't know if they will re-open in a few months, or years, or ever. This is quite a blow. It not only inconveniences me, it impoverishes the whole area. Before I'd even got to use it as a place for meeting the locals, it's gone.

Now I sense you beginning to panic slightly as you wonder if this means my blog will come to an untimely end as my internet connection vanishes in a puff of electrical smoke and I go truly off grid. Never fear, I will endeavour to keep this show on the road for a while longer even though it means greater sacrifices for myself. I shall just have to start going weekly to the Quarry Cafe in Machynlleth and post the blog up there (which incidentally serves better and cheaper coffee than the Brigand's Inn. And the connection's faster.) It may mean shifting the day to Wednesday as that's the market day in Mach. Hopefully we can all cope with that and see this thing through together. 

(0) Onto the more positive, uplifting and generally more silver-lined section of this post. If you would like to hear about how I met some more people this week, go to section (1) below. Or if you would prefer to learn about the fledgling steps I've taken in market research, go to section (2).  Alternatively if you're more interested in my attempts at foraging, turn to section (3). If you're read all of them, or at least all those you can be bothered to read, visit section (4). (Ah, this brings back happy memories of all those "Choose Your Own Adventure" and "Fighting Fantasy" books I devoted large chunks of my childhood to). 

(1) This week I received my first actual visitors, two friends I know from Dorset who were heading back there after spending a wet honeymoon together in Snowdonia. They couldn't stay long but I was able to provide cups of tea and a tour of the land, which they tell me they had been intrigued to see, and I felt a newfound emotion - a sense of proprietorship.

I have also now met my next-door neighbours, a very friendly couple in their late fifties who normally live across the border but make occasional stops at their Welsh plot of land which conveniently has a residence on it, an old toll house. Espying them from a distance I hailed them and was invited over across the little stream which forms the boundary, and made their acquaintance, ending up with a gift of some chicken-wire fencing they didn't need.  

Return to section (0) and make your next choice.

(2) It's rare that market research boils down to getting on a bus and visiting the local market but in this case that's what happened, or would have happened if I hadn't missed the bus and been forced to drive my fuel-thirsty Suzuki instead.  I was there on business to check out the competition in land-produced goods. I found a bustling couple of streets packed with stalls, including two regular fruit & veg outlets, a trendy organic one from Aberystwyth, and a local co-operative selling various home-grown and home-made goods for the benefit of its members. This latter stall told me that they tended to sell everything they put out.  Also the Quarry vegetarian cafe claims to buy local produce.

Clearly I'm a long way from actually having any produce but it's helpful to begin to understand what channels exist for sales around here. 

Now head back to section (0).

(3) Inspired by a book called Wild Foods I'd pinched from Pilsdon's library, I stepped out of my caravan on Monday armed only with a bucket, a pair of gloves and kitchen scissors and harvested a bunch of young stinging nettles that were merrily bursting forth around the awning. Once washed, slapped in a frying pan with some butter, salt and pepper and sauteed for quarter of an hour, they miraculously lost their venom and became something akin to spinach, although I confess my first bite was a cautious one. Since then I've eaten them for two more meals as it's a no-brainer - free tasty food on my doorstep, and according to Wild Foods they increase haemoglobin, improve circulation, lower blood pressure, lower blood sugar level and generally purify the body. Basically you never die if you keep eating them.

Back to section (0) with you.

(4) Well done, you have reached the end of your quest. And I've reached the end of my thirty-eighth year. Happy birthday to me!

Important Note: For the next two weeks I will be visiting Lammas, an eco-village in Pembrokeshire, helping a family there build a barn. I have no idea whether there will be any internet connection; if not then this is it from me until the end of May. Ta-ta for now, as they don't say around here!

With A Little Help From My Friends

Living alone below a Welsh mountain, as I now do, has its pluses and minuses. Some of the huge pluses are, in no particular order: being able to do what I want when I want for as long as I feel like; waking up each morning surrounded by an idyll of natural beauty, an opera of birdsong and the constant rush of the river below; having the space to just be me; the healthy physical exertion of labouring on the land; noticing buds all around form different kinds of leaves and flowers; listening to the woodpecker drill, owl hoot and blackbird free-form jazz improv; and savouring the otherworldly feeling of living without any media input - no TV, internet or even radio (there's no reception). I get to read J.B.Priestley instead.

On the flip side, well, I have to say the drawbacks are so far vastly outweighed by the plus-sides, but it's early days yet. There are a few negatives, however, such as: having to do my clothes washing by hand in a bucket; constantly battling to keep the caravan clean from mud; showers in a tiny space that last no more than a minute before the hot water runs out; banging my head on something several times a day; forever taking my wellies on and off as I forget things I need within the caravan; the whole place turning into a mire when it rains; and the almost-daily fetching buckets of water from the stream to fill the caravan's "water-hog" which is beginning to lose its romanticism.

Boredom and loneliness, those terrible twins, are not getting a look in. Each day gets filled up, not that I'm doing a million things but everything I do does take quite a time. For instance if I need to get on the internet for some reason (such as posting this very blog for your delectation) I either cycle a mile to the Brigand's Inn and buy an expensive coffee to be allowed to use their WiFi, or I carry on another few miles south along the River Dovey till I get to an area with mobile internet coverage (but no rainproof coverage). Not quite the always-connected experience I had grown accustomed to in London. 

I have begun to make friends this week, you may be startled to learn, and I don't just mean with the local population of songbirds. On Wednesday I drove my trusty Jimny northwest over a high mountain pass, down past the squat slate town of Dolgellau and up into a vast forest beyond, in the middle of which live Chris Dixon* with his wife Lynn. They've been living there, off grid, since the 80's which knocks my two-and-a-half-weeks into a cocked hat. Full of friendly advice and permaculture wisdom, they made me feel very welcome, showing me round their plot which has changed beyond recognition from the sheep field it once was, and saying they will visit me sometime in the summer. I came away with a book on permaculture and seven fresh eggs. 

Yesterday I set off in the opposite direction and twenty-four miles later (this is what counts as next-door-but-one in these parts) arrived in Caersws where Malcolm Carroll lives with his family. A connection through Greenpeace, despite knowing nothing about me he and his wife gave me a warm welcome and we got chatting about perennial vegetables and what sorts of things Greenpeace might do in the area. This time I returned with six bagfulls of year-old pig manure that they said they were glad to be rid of, just because I happened to enquire where I might get hold of some compost for my seed potatoes. 

So on top of all this socialising I've now got all the potatoes in, some in triple-dug soil and others in no-dug soil, as an experiment. I've been getting quotes from ecologists for a Phase 1 Habitat Survey, partly as a prerequisite for any future planning application and partly to discover what manner of beast and plant actually lives here with me. I have sent off a sample of the soil from the eastern field to a lab in Lincolnshire for analysis to discover its pH value and levels of those useful chemicals potassium, phosphorous and magnesium. I have attacked and cleared some of the brambles that were threatening to overtake three Norway Firs. I have roamed the local footpaths, checking out the visibility of my caravan from various angles. I think I deserve a break this weekend - it's the Machynlleth Comedy Festival and I'm going to try to get a ticket to see Mark Thomas whose book "As Used On The Famous Nelson Mandela" I've just read. It's all happening here in mid-Wales.

*Real names used this week for a change.