Reflecting on 4 years exploring off-grid communities.
Over the last 4 years I have spent most of my time living in a few different off grid communities / homesteads in Wales, Dorset, Devon and Somerset,
but mainly in Wales. This article is a fairly brief and meandering reflection on what I have experienced.
People want to live in a more intimate relationship with nature. They want to feel more independent (from the consumerist modern culture, particularly); they want a greater sense of autonomy and choice in how they raise their children, the kind of home and home environment they live in, and in how they ‘make a living’.
The reason for wanting to immerse myself in these communities has been primarily because I have wanted to learn what it takes to ‘live off the land’. I have craved the freedom that comes from building your own home, growing your own food.. finding some self-governing sovereignty by work and perseverance, and that craving has led me to some very interesting people, and some very interesting places.
The first community I visited was called Grow Heathrow. It sat on the bones of an old protest camp.. in fact in some senses it still was a protest camp. But people had built some pallet shacks and all sorts of other odd dens over the years and put up some very large polytunnels to grow all sorts of vegetables. The hum of the motorway constantly filled the air, and airplanes would thunder overhead regularly.. not my idea of paradise, but it was interesting to me. I found my way there after a long series of
events following stumbling into the Extinction Rebellion protest on waterloo bridge— which sucked me into a world of muddy field protesting and firelit nights in the woods and squat open mic nights. But there was something different about Grow Heathrow that struck me… in that people were actually living there — this could be a way of life and not just a temporary camp or gathering from which everyone returned home afterwards! After that visit I wanted to know what else was out there.
Someone put me on to https://diggersanddreamers.org.uk/ — an online directory of the UKs intentional communities… at least the ones that want to be known of. So that was my way in. I emailed several off grid communities and soon enough found myself at Tinkers Bubble, on the southern edge of Somerset. These people were serious — they kept pigs and horses and milking goats and chickens.. the horses pulled douglas fir logs around the woods in winter and in summer they carted into town to sell homemade cider. They worked hard at living off-grid and aimed for self-sufficiency. Vegetable growing involved excel spreadsheets drawn up on cold winter nights. They bought in flour, sugar, tea, some charity shop clothes and tools.. but not much else. The community sat on top of a big wooded hill looking down over the plains of Somerset, and winter felt stark and cold. But the dozen or so people that lived there worked closely together and lived in a way that fostered closeness and communal responsibility. They were a little family toughing it out… a little bubble of hard grafting land-wed independence. I think they took great satisfaction in the feeling that if the world out there down the hill fell apart in some grand armageddhon, that they might just about be okay — if not a bit lonely…
But where we spent by far the longest time was at a place called Tipi Valley — a fairly large rugged ecovillage that sprung up in the mid-hills of Carmarthenshire, Wales, in the early 1970s. It begun when a small bunch of hippies bought a field off an eccentric landowner in a quiet valley as far from urbanised life as they could, drove a couple buses over the moorland and parked up with a bold dream to live close to nature and forsake much of the technology and convenience of modern life.
There isn’t much organisation at Tipi Valley — little attempt to live as a unified commune, but rather a wide assortment of folk living shoulder to shoulder amongst the ferns and rushes and willow trees in yurts, tipis, geodomes.. and nowadays more than anything else: in modest round cob homes with wood burning stoves. Cosy, cheap and easy to build, easy to heat and practical — these homes would solve the housing crisis of our country if people could fathom taking them seriously. But it’s not what we’re used to, and it’s designed from a very different starting point to modern house design… a very different approach to life. I have set foot in dozens of these mud roundhouses, and I can say that at least to me they seem much more comfortable and pleasant than most modern homes. Also, they sit happily amongst the boughs of trees and green hillsides in such a calm and kind manner.. they’re alot less stark and unfriendly to look at. And I think that matters quite a lot actually.
We seem to have convinced ourselves that it’s okay to make our own landscape — the one that has fed and clothed and cared for us for generations upon generations — we seem to think it’s okay to cover it in ugly buildings and all sorts of other stuff built of harmful chemical crap! We’ve
made our world so awfully ugly.
But it’s hard to escape that.. one way or another — you can hide in the quietest valley you can find — but one way or another the plastic things creep in, the supermarket shopping and the neon soled trainers and our devices that we feel that we can’t live with out.. they creep in. It’s hard to rid ourselves of all of that. I’ve met very few people who even want to, but a part of me certainly did. It still does I think, in some way. But I’ve also come to feel that the world I live in — it might not be perfect — but I don’t have to shun it entirely… I don’t have to hate it or the way it is, or the people in it. And I don’t want to. Running away from the world and all its people is not what I want to do. I want a dialogue with the world that is — with this world and the people in it. Part of that dialogue is to ask why we are so unhappy, why we have been hurting our mother earth so dearly, and why there seems to be so little hope for a healthy and beautiful world for our grandchildren.
The people who are setting off into the woods and pastures on the fringes of our civilised urban world are doing so because they are unhappy with the society that has been created.. and I think most of us can understand why if we give it thought. But for many this feels far off and unrealistic— and unappealing. When the whole world is walking towards AI and electric airplanes and.. into ‘the future’.. going ‘back’ towards how we used to live on the land can seem a bit odd and even pointless to many — if not impractical. Not to those who are living it though. And there are many that for circumstance or matters of courage and confidence have not taken that leap despite wanting to. So we carry on towing the line, quietly hoping that some kind of change will come. Change that will take our all-too-human world closer to the paradise that nature intended, and a little less sour and unkind.
I wonder what that might look like if it was to come. Would it look like hundreds of thousands flocking out of cities and into our desecrated countryside to build little cob roundhouses and plant gardens everywhere and form a continuous hodgepodge ecovillage from lands end to John O’Groates? I’m not sure. Something like that, maybe. But it would also be nice to think about how we could transform our world into somewhere that no one feels the need to escape from. Though if that’s not working for you… maybe go and find the diggers and dreamers and try it out for yourself.
