If I Had A Hammer

I have less than three weeks left before my first off-grid season is up and I head back south to Pilsdon for the winter. When I arrived in April I set myself six months to determine whether this is the right step by answering three fundamental questions: is the land capable of supporting a small land-based community; do I actually want to live in this manner; and if so do I want to live in this particular area?

By the time I return to Dorset I will need to have all three points answered although in fact I’m fairly sure already. It is with an odd brew of emotions that I will be leaving Wales in October. I have made some good new friends here these last few months and look forward to building on those relationships next year. The openness and friendliness of people in the local villages of Mallwyd, Dinas Mawddwy and Aberangell have made me feel very welcomed, something that I absolutely do not take as a given as an Englishman arriving in the Welsh heartlands. The craggy beauty of the area has made a deep impression on me. And the work itself, although often laborious and completely unpaid, is nonetheless rewarding because it's not someone else's project I'm labouring for. Yet I do look forward to rejoining the Pilsdon community for the winter, to catch up with friends there, to participate again in their rhythms of life and crucially to warm my digits by their beautiful open-hearth log fire.

If I had decided not to return in the spring then I don’t think I would have erected a greenhouse and a firewood store last weekend. Yet this, with the invaluable help of Matt and Mary who came all the way from Dorset for two days and Grainne who came from Machynlleth on Saturday, is what I did. With the principles of reversibility (the ability to return the land easily to its original condition) and sustainability (using local and/or recycled materials) in mind, we managed to put up both buildings within the weekend and still had time to spare for an evening’s cosy campfire made from a huge fallen ash branch.

The greenhouse I had bought second-hand from someone in nearby Ruthin. For its base I decided to buy twenty interlocking “Ecobase” tiles made from recycled plastic instead of using cement, sand and slabs – more expensive but less damaging to the environment (cement production releases tonnes of CO2) and easier to remove cleanly. Below the tiles is just earth that I had removed bracken roots from, which we then packed firm and levelled off using wooden boards, a spirit level and some synchronised jumping. The glass panes will be put in next spring so there's no risk of them being blown out over winter. The end result looks great, and the pheasants love it too as a high perch.

I had designed the firewood store around the odds and ends I have accumulated for free from locals wanting to be rid of them – two large MDF boards, two pallets, two corrugated iron sheets – and four upright posts made from my own Christmas trees. Mary had studied architecture and Matt carpentry, and I’m pretty good at holding things still in the right place, so we had the perfect mix of skills. It just needs some side walls (a couple more pallets should do the trick) and then I’ll fill it with chopped firewood to see me through the ravages of winter 2014. Incredible what a few extra hands for two days can achieve!

 

 

 

Gone Fishin'

With the purchase of my land came the right to fish in the small river it borders. Being a tributary of the River Dovey, a well-known sea trout and salmon river, it seems reasonable to expect a few of them to hang a right on reaching the junction and come swimming past my banks.  This assumption is lent weight by the fact that the Prince Albert Angling Society owns fishing rights a bit further upstream. 

I find it odd that the act of luring a fish to its death should so blandly be termed “fishing”. People don't go “deer-ing”, “fox-ing” or “rabbit-ing”; in the 19th century wealthy colonial types didn't spend time in Africa “big game-ing”. No, hunting and shooting nicely sums up these activities. It seems unfair to fish to name the art of destroying them after themselves, and unfair also to those who simply want to go and observe them or even swim with them – why can't these more benign pursuits be called “fishing”? So here and now I propose that we change the term to “fish-hunting” and be done with it. I am sure it will catch on.

So I have the right to fish-hunt along a 400m stretch of river. What fun to be had! I had never before been fish-hunting but the primal glamour suddenly appealed. I would pop down there before supper and land myself a 4lb trout, gut it, grill it and have it with new potatoes and foraged sauteed nettles. Hardly any need to go food shopping at all.

Even before arriving on the land I had bought my “spinning” rod, the type that is supposed to emulate a darting small fish and which is purportedly easier to use than a “fly-fishing” rod which mimics, well, a fly. I had paid for my fish-hunting license, allowing me to catch as many trout and salmon as I like between 20 March and 17 October. I had had a couple of lessons from a gruff northerner at Pilsdon in a field in which I managed to catch the hedge. I was all set.

The reality began to dawn pretty quickly. Firstly, the river is about five metres down below the bank and there are only a couple of places where you can just about scramble down, and hope you can scramble up again. Secondly I learned that fish only bother to come up this river when it's in speight, i.e. after a downpour so the river is running faster and deeper than its usual shallow self. Thirdly, the opposite bank is only five or six metres away with branches hanging everywhere so it is perilously easy to get the bait stuck high up in a tree before it even reaches the water.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, I have on several occasions these past months put on my fish-hunting gear and strode off to catch myself a whopper. The other day it was even the right conditions for it. But whoever claims that fish-hunting is calming or pleasurable in some way is clearly doing something different. Catching a blinking fish, for instance. I have learned to count it a success if after several minutes I haven't got the hook caught on some twig or rock, or got the line horribly tangled somehow around the reel. After the last session where I caught just two wet leaves, I was still glad that I hadn't lost the spinning bait and for once hadn't let my mounting irritation get the better of me and stormed back vowing to leave the fish forever be.

But I think this season at least, the local trout have little to fear passing by my land.

I Feel Like Pheasant Tonight

It has finally happened. In my thirty-ninth year I have performed a rite of passage that ushers me into true manhood. I have killed a living beast with my own hands, cooked it and eaten it.

True, in many cultures across this planet this would be seen as nothing out of the ordinary. In places where people have not been divorced from the source of their food as we in the West have they know that if you want meat you have to kill one of your animals. No wonder meat is generally considered a luxury in such parts of the world.

The story of how I ended up with grilled pheasant breast for dinner on Monday is not for the faint-hearted so if you consider yourself such I suggest you skip this blogpost and spend a few minutes instead thinking about small lambs gambolling on the side of a grassy knoll as fluffy clouds scud past above...  There, I think they've gone. On we go.

The unlucky bird in question I found by the side of the A-road at the top of my track, sat perfectly still as cars zoomed past. When I approached it didn't move so I picked it up and brought it down the track. It must have been hit by a car; there was some blood on its beak but no other obvious injuries. Setting it down it still wouldn't move, and coming back an hour later it was still there. I sat with it a few minutes. It seemed alert for a bit but then slowly its eyelids drooped and it sank lower until the sound of a car passing brought it back to wakefulness. I offered it a leaf to nibble but it showed no interest. It was clearly going to die, if not of starvation then of internal injuries or by being attacked by something, none of which are pleasant end-scenarios. The moral imperative was on me to end its suffering.

How to do it exactly? Consulting a friend by text I learned I had to hold its neck and pull its head very hard, to break it. I worked up my courage over lunch, then put on some gloves and returned. It probably viewed me as its saviour having rescued it from the road. It did however begin to struggle when I grasped it below the neck with one hand. Quickly before I lost the nerve I took its head in my other hand and yanked hard. It didn't work, the bird was still alive but silently writhing and flapping with a newly-elongated neck. I tried again, the neck extended again and bled but it still flapped. A third time, and now it looked like some kind of horror-pheasant, an evil parody of a swan, but it had not died. This was terrible, I was supposed to be putting it out of its misery but was instead causing it grievous injury. Figuring that no animal can live without its head, I decided to tug so hard that it would probably sever it from its body, and that's exactly what happened. I threw both pieces of the pheasant on the ground and watched the body jig and kick for another minute or so until it finally rested. In peace, I hope.

Once my heart had returned to a more normal rhythm I took the bird and hung it from its legs from my washing line and got on with my afternoon tasks. Around 6pm it was time to make dinner, which on this occasion meant slicing up a fresh pheasant carcase to extract the breast meat. I sterilised my Swedish hunting knife in boiling water, laid the pheasant on some newspaper, shooed the flies away as best I could and began hacking at it. I have no doubt there is a tried-and-trusted technique for doing this but without the internet, relevant books or knowledgeable friends to hand and a growing appetite, I just figured it out myself. Before too long I had the breast meat on a tray, and the rest of the bird in a bin-liner. I know there's more meat there but one step at a time, OK?  Having rinsed the meat under the tap and dried it, it was just a case of grilling it and re-heating some veg and pasta I'd made earlier. The flesh wasn't as tough as I had expected, and tasted slightly stronger than chicken. But, free meat! I couldn't get over it.

As it happened I had just finished reading the new ZeroCarbonBritain report which sets out a scenario for how the UK can reduce our net carbon emissions to zero by 2030, one of the factors being a massive reduction in how much meat we eat (to allow grazing land to be converted to other uses). The report is thought-provoking and definitely worth a read. It got me thinking how eating pheasant is pretty low-carbon – the birds don't take up any land exclusively, and don't require too much feeding. Then I remembered that they attract the likes of Michael Schumacher and Dame Kiri te Kanawa, flying here in their personal jets or helicopters for a day of shooting before zooming off again, and realised the true carbon cost of the humble pheasant.

In The Line Of Fire

My very own potatoes

The shot rang out across the narrow valley. Instantly everyone hit the ground and there was an awful second of silence before the screaming and shouting began. It was impossible to tell at first if anyone had been hit. I was by the tent where my sister lay sick with diarrhoea, and had been trying to explain to one of the visitors what was wrong with her. Now we both lay almost on top of each other, shaking with fear. A little way across camp a group gradually converged around a prone body, it looked like Maria. I suspected the worst but then she raised an arm, gripped her leg. Another two shots burst across us. We were suddenly galvanised and everyone made for the two 4x4s, running low. The visitors at first tried only to take Maria but six of us managed to force our way on and the drivers, yelling in anger and desperation, floored it out of there.

In case you are concerned that Wales has recently and dramatically spiralled into a chaos of refugee camps, armed bandits and NGO's, let me assure you that this is by no means the case. Wales is as placid as ever. Neither have I moved in the last few days to Kandahar. This was merely a training simulation, mocked up to place some charity workers in a scenario they may one day discover out 'in the field', or in layman's terms, abroad in a danger zone. The training was taking place not far from where I live, a friend of mine was involved in running it and someone dropped out so she drafted me in at short notice to play an 'Internally Displaced Person' living in a refugee camp, tucked away in a gorge below Cader Idris.

During the day we had four groups of delegates visit us, each presented with the same nerve-wracking situation and each handling it slightly differently. They had had to negotiate their way through two checkpoints, one governmental, one rebel, to be with us, neither of which gave them an easy time.  Any of us refugees who managed to get a lift out of there were summarily executed by the rebels back at their checkpoint, being of a different tribe. I died twice. The point was, I think, that every decision taken has its consequences so you must prepare for every eventuality in detail beforehand. It was all captured on camera and the highlights were screened that evening to various people's embarrassment and merriment.

Back in the rather less charged atmosphere of my plot of land, I am proud to announce that the soil has produced its first cultivated vegetable under my diligent management. Having planted about twenty humble 'seed' potatoes (i.e. just small potatoes that are supposedly guaranteed disease-free) in May, I noticed a couple of weeks back that four plants were wilting and going yellow so I cut the stems off at the base and left the potatoes underground for a while for the skins to harden. Yesterday I dug these ones up. They're on the small side, probably as it's a bit early to dig them up yet, but they haven't been nibbled by any creepy-crawly which is a reason to celebrate (last year at Pilsdon most of the spuds had holes from eelworm). Time to distil a batch of vodka with my land's firstfruits... or maybe I'll just boil them up with butter, salt and spinach for dinner.

On the left, the potatoes from double-dug soil.
On the right, those from non-dug soil (with bracken roots and all).

The Show Must Go On

The bored young woman, sitting with her legs folded and a clipboard perched on them, looked at her watch and gave a nod. Immediately two gates were raised, two nervous sheep were shoved out, two burly farmers grabbed them and with electric shears began to divest them of their wool in an exceedingly brusque manner. The animals wriggled and squirmed but were unable to release themselves from the grip of their determined barbers as they were held first upside down, then flipped over, then on their side.  The shearing on the right finished first after only a minute or so, the demon barber releasing it, standing straight and carefully keeping a grin of triumph from sliding onto his face.

I was at the Dinas Mawddwy Show. Every village here holds their annual Show around this time of year, some large affairs, some more low-key like this one. Being a sheep farming district, these woolly ruminants form a fairly central element of the Show what with the speed-shearing and sheepdog trials but there was also an archery competition (the target placed just below the hedge of the lane above making the mere act of walking along it something of a suicidal act), horse-riding competitions, dog competitions, vegetable competitions, and when you're tired of all this competing you can simply peruse the stalls of local produce selling herbs, honey, beeswax soaps, jewellery, and the like.

The week just gone has seen several of my niggling concerns put to rest, or at least on their way to being resolved.  One of them, for instance, is: if I grow fruit and veg next year, where am I actually going to sell it? The weekly market at Machynlleth has a local cooperative stall but is thirteen miles away, you have to stay there all day to take unsold produce home and the stall possibly has enough veg to meet demand already. Ideally I would sell my veg more locally, to the inhabitants of Mallwyd and Dinas Mawddwy. I asked the owner of the shop at Mallwyd's petrol station (the only local shop) if she would be willing to sell some of my veg next year, and her reply was yes, she would try! Can't say fairer than that. 

And as I walked into the Show the first person I saw was a big dreadlocked chap called Peter* who had once picked me up hitch-hiking back from Mach, and the first thing he said to me was did I want to help him start up a local cooperative growing and selling fruit and veg, possibly with a veg box delivery scheme? Um, yes!

The big news of course this week is that the local pub, the Brigand's Inn, has re-opened. Those of you who have avidly followed this blog since April (yes both of you) will remember the shock of its unexpected closure back in May as I lost my nearest social meeting hub and WiFi access. The new manager has smartened it up a little more, including the food prices which do make your eyes smart, and seemed open to the idea of buying in locally grown veg when asked about it by Peter and myself. However I can't get my laptop to connect to the internet on their WiFi for some reason.

More of my worries answered:

1) Where to get enough cardboard to mulch my rapidly enlarging growing area? The friendly shop manager at the petrol station said I can take as much cardboard as I need each week from now on.

2) Where can I get an affordable greenhouse from? I found one for sale on eBay only forty miles away that I won for the princely sum of £38. So last week I drove there with Peter who'd offered to help and together we dismantled it and brought it back in my trailer.

3) How will I stop the pheasants from eating all the veg seedlings as they grow next year? Johnny* the chief gamekeeper offered to construct a huge fully enclosed cage, with netting across the top, around the whole area.

It all begins to seem a little more achievable.

Caravan in the woods

*Not their actual names.