*updated* video quicklink | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71lJZ-ANOmA
Lammas turned out to be not thirty miles from the childhood home my parents lost. To an extent, I knew this before I went - English people on land I call my own. Now there’s a racism which goes back centuries. And yet I knew that this was not going to be an uncomfortable journey for me. I am sorry if this is more personal than you may care to read, but I want you to understand what I learned.
Set where the fields meet the hillside, we’re talking land which has been the threadbare grazing of nothing but sheep for decades, windswept and washed away to the waterlogged valleys below. A few scraggly bushes and a band of trees are all that remain of what was once the crowning glory of this summit; the ready remnants of deforestation.
The first thing I notice is the base camp. I cannot help but recognise how well it is situated, tucked into the trees where no breeze may bear a chill, lifted off the ground to avoid the damp. Where I should never have pitched a tent come November, here I see how it can be done. Above me are two banks of saplings bending to the wind as they shield the camp and provide a break to the expanse. I learn later that they are willow, planted for a multitude of uses.
There’s a rope swing hanging from a tree - I used to play on one such and feel at home, for it was in places like this that I built my dens, half hedgerow, half woodland with thickets of hazel, bramble and sloes. I recall picking these with Dad, who gave gleeful account of his skill in Depression and War time, bearing gifts from the Black Mountain for tea. Yet I can never forget that he’d eaten the ponies too. This always horrified me and I remember him close to tears whenever he saw a mountain foal. There used to be so many, he would say.
After half an hour of wandering free, I am joined by Simon Dale who comes down from the first house being built, for our interview. He has an elfin look which fits perfectly with his surroundings. I admire his tent and am told that it was three days and £6.50 in the making - Zerocredit_UK pays her respects! I ask about natural resources and learn that the spring will provide energy as well as water in the longer term, so there’s no need for solar panels: a few battered ones will provide light through the coming winter, then that’s it. Low impact living at 75% self-sufficiency and the remaining 25% derived from income through land based activity, or surplus stock so to speak.
Earlier this summer I had blogged on The Lie of the Land in neighbouring Ceredigion. Whenever I go home, I remain irked that I cannot myself afford such residence. I ask what, for me, is the ultimate question: how have the locals responded? The answer is as I expect, mixed. But the response to quibbles about building on land for which no other planning permission is granted is formidable. Here is an example of affordable housing, capable of bringing Wales back to the glory in which my father knew it and all for £35,000 plot and planning, three thousand to build the house, propagation of indigenous plants for food and not a mains supply in sight.
To me, most admirable of all, Lammas has a Welsh Language policy so as to become wholly cohesive with local culture and tradition. This is neither tree hugging exercise nor yet another Anglo Welsh invasion. Indeed here, for the first time, I can see my way home in a possibility which is utterly sustainable. Dad would have loved it!
Emma, @Zerocredit_UK
