Off Grid Homesteading in Wales Takes Simple Living all the Way
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Hoppie and Tao are the initiators of the Lammas Eco Village in Wales, UK. Their space is located on former fields that had been overgrazed by sheep for 25 years and after a procedure of four years to buy the land and get planning permission, the fields transformed into a mosaic of ecosystems. The couple built their main house within a year – meanwhile living in caravans, with no water, toilets or Wi-Fi.
At the entrance of the site are two small huts. One is their firewood store, made with douglas fir and built with a gap underneath so that air can flow through naturally and dry all the timber. The other one is a little bigger and serves as their guest accommodation. It is their most recent addition, a cabin kit they bought cheap. However, they realized it was cheap because it started leaking, which is why they built a conservatory with recycled windows in front of it. The floor is made with beautiful ocean-worn slates they collected at a local beach and all the added wood is collected and sculpted by themselves. A big window-door leads inside the original cabin, consisting of one bedroom and another door on the other side leads into a charming bathroom, where the shower is heated by a passive solar heating system.
Between these cabins and the main house is the guest-composting-toilet, consisting of two chambers. When one of the chambers is full, it takes around two years for it to be converted into good, usable soil and meanwhile the other chamber can be used. Then, there is a multi-purpose barn. On one side are a freezer, storage for vegetables, a shower for volunteers – which used to the milking parlour for cows they had in the past – and the hay for their goat. On the other side are their goats, which Hoppie and Tao regularly milk, always leaving enough for the goat babies.
In the middle of the site is a big, round, unfinished wooden construction. Originally, this was to become the couple's home, but eventually they decided to turn it into the Lammas Earth Center: a center for transformation and healing, with a sound temple just behind it.
Hoppie and Tao's main home is made with douglas fir and raised slightly off the ground. They built it onto 15 cement pillars dug into the bedrock, so that if the building were taken away, these circles would be the only thing remaining. It was important to them from the start that the building's footprint on the land would be as low-impact as possible. All the windows of the building are recycled and the sides have very wide eaves, in order to keep the water run off away from the building. The water gets channeled behind the house and has fed all the water flow through their plot.
At the entrance is a small lobby room where the battery reserves are, which store all the energy from the solar panels. The main living space is a big room holding living room and kitchen. The gorgeous kitchen is full of herbs, ointments and potions and in the winter they cook on top of their range, which at the same times heats up the space, together with a small wood burner in the living room. All the water they get from a source they share with nearby farms. A wooden ladder leads upstairs to the loft, their bedroom. In terms of construction, the house is a stud frame, just like very simple barn. Living in caravans in their first year on the land, they needed to accommodate their family very quickly and tried to be as efficient as possible.
There are two other small rooms: one which is Hoppie's sound healing room, where she does her sound therapy. Beside it a pantry where they process milk and store food and equipment. Composting is specially important to Tao: the raw foods are for the compost heaps, the cooked food for the pigs. Cooked food is trickier to deal with as it attracts rats.
Tao had a very ordinary upbringing, yet never really felt rooted, finding roots only later while living in communities all of his adult life. Hoppie never felt more empowered: her supermarket is a garden and her pharmacy a herb garden. She says that thanks to hydropower and solar power, they can live a modern day life and yet be totally integrated with nature.
"If you're rooted enough into the landscape, you know that the land will support you with clean water, with good food, with good solid shelter, with a bit of livelihood. And if you've got that kind of base, you have an incredible freedom and space about your life, you're not constrained by heavy mortgages or nine to five jobs, but a lot of space to explore being rooted in the land, which gives an incredible sense of resilience and empowerment."
