A New Chapter

I felt a twang of sadness as I drove away from the makeshift shepherd’s hut that has been our home for the last twenty-five months, car loaded with our essential belongings, pots and pans and cutlery rattling, black bags bursting with clothes and bedding crammed into the backseat, mattress strapped to the roof and two big, hairy dogs panting happily in the boot. They’re always happy when they’re going somewhere, those two. There were three dogs when we came here. My old faithful, gentle boy, Pippin, breathed his last on the hill. He’d already held on long enough to move with us. Longer than he should have. His breath had stopped once already, some months before. I’d watched his tongue turn blue and the light leave his eyes and for a moment he was gone, and I’d pulled him back with the caress of my hands stroking his soft, white brow and my voice, good boy, Pippin, it’s okay, sweet boy. His wretched body relaxed under my hands and his breath came back, and his blood flowed again and the light came back to him, and then he got up and ate some chicken and plodded along devotedly by my side for another while. Always by my side, through thick and thin, through mess and heartache, through marriage and countless house moves, through the raising of my son, he was my shoulder, my oak, my sweet, gentlest boy. Until that first, frigid winter on the hill finished him. No coming back, this time. This time I let him go and he slipped easily, quickly, without a struggle. He had already outstayed his time, defeated death by the pull of pure devotion. We buried him down by the willows where the soil is deep and the honeysuckle winds its sweet scent around the grove and sunlight filters through soft and green. We thought we might build our home down there, for a time. It seemed like a good plot, away from the road but not too far across the land to put a drivable track in, and tucked behind a ridge, sheltered enough from the bitter north with a view south across the valley. But, no. That wasn’t to be. I felt a twang of sadness for the dreams and possibilities I was leaving behind as I drove away from the land and the last two years of living and breathing it through every turn in the season, for all the lessons learned, all the stories told and untold, and headed over the hill to start a new chapter, in a new home, two dogs panting happily in the boot.

Pippin

Truth be told we didn’t really have a clue what we would do after we sold our house and gave our stuff away and came to live on the land in a leaky old caravan and the makeshift shepherd’s hut we built onto it for that first winter. We just knew we needed to be on or close to the land we had been farming for three years already while living in a run-down old cottage on an acre twenty-five miles away, and we were winging it on a giant leap of faith that somehow everything would work itself out and we would make a new home here. We thought about building on the land. We spoke to planning advisors. We could have built on the land. But it would have meant compromises that we didn’t want to make. Compromises on how we farm, how we keep our herd, to make it more about “taxable income” than simply feeding us and others from the land. Compromises on what we could build, too. If it were up to us, we would have built a low-key cabin tucked into the land with a composting toilet and a turf roof, built with local timbers, insulated with local sheep’s wool and heated with the willows that grow on the land. But that wouldn’t comply with current building regulations. And, I don’t know, something about building new, according to their regs and specs, ripping up rock and trucking in concrete on virgin, wild land… just didn’t feel right. So to plan b. The plan that was always meant to be, we just had to rule out the other options first. An old homestead. A renovation project. A new, old home close to the land.

We have no internet connection in our new home. Mobile coverage is unreliable in this dip in the hills and doesn’t get through the thick, stone walls we’re living in. I have to go up the road or over to the farm to check emails and messages. I don’t mind. I’m enjoying the quiet, the break from constant connectivity. We have no heating until we get around to knocking a hole through the stones for the flue to put a wood stove in. The exposed stone walls are cold and damp and the roof leaks. No running water but drinkable water from a spring on the land that comes with this old homestead. And still no power which had to be disconnected after the house burnt down and will be months waiting for a new connection (if anyone knows a local sparky who isn’t booked up until spring, please, shoot me a message!). I’m writing this wrapped up in all my bedclothes by candle and grey, rainy window light, with a big, soft, fluffy German shepherd warming my feet on the floor. Our breath hangs in the chill. Our clothes and bedding are damp. I warm my hands by the candle when my fingers won’t write anymore.

Every morning I get into damp clothes and boots, grab my milk bucket, load the big, boisterous German shepherd and the old husky into the car and drive up a rough, gravel road into the rising sun, through the mist over the high hill and over to the land. I’m running around with three heads between the land we spent the last two years on, where the goats and half the sheep are still needing to be milked and fed and cleaned and bedded and let out and brought in according to the whims of the weather, and the one-room, old stone shed we’re currently living and sleeping in with all our stuff piled up around us and two big, hairy dogs taking up the floor while we work on renovating the goats’ new house (first, of course) and then our home. Every evening I drive back over the hill and down into the sunset through the mist rolling off the mountain, into the green and shelter of majestic oaks and ancient hollies and I catch myself gasping, how lucky am I?! And then I remind myself that I make my own luck. That none of this is by chance, but by intention and graft and unwavering faith that everything will be exactly as it’s meant to be. That we held on and fought for so long and so hard for this place to be ours. And we’ll get there, all in good time. Two years in a hut on the hill trained us well for this.

sunrise over the high hill

home into the green

I can hear the buzz of a chainsaw and men’s voices next door. We have neighbours. Very close neighbours whose homes overlook ours. That was one of the concessions we made for being close to the land, close enough to keep our farm, and for the trees, the shelter, the green pastures, everything else this little homestead tucked into the hills offered. We wanted privacy, seclusion. We got a close, small community of neighbours. A community of West Cork’s finest, old-school locals, born and bred and part of these hills, who speak a tongue so thick even my husband who hails from only twenty miles down the road, himself born and bred West Cork for as many generations as he can trace, struggles to interpret; and hippie blow-ins living on the land. The kind of neighbours who’ve offered to help us rebuild the house, spoke of the inklings of a community garden, and jumped right in when they saw us struggling to help us catch a sheep. I’ve written and thought a lot about community over the last couple of years. I guess I got what I wished for, even if it isn’t quite how I imagined I wanted it. And even so, here in the sanctuary of stone walls under the cover of the ash tree and the dense, old hollies that bound this little homestead, it feels private and secluded after the exposure of the open hill, half a mile from the nearest neighbour and yet open to the elements and prying satellite eyes and any passersby. Secluded, but yet encompassed by a local community. A good place to settle down, set roots, and make a home.

I find it hard to describe exactly what this little corner of Substack is, or what it’s about. That’s probably why I am prone to regularly updating my About page, as I continually try to refine and redefine what it is I’m doing here. I suppose it has always found itself to be and will continue to be just a farm blog, or journal, as much as it is anything else. It evolves, as I do, as life does, as my farm does. “I write stories on land and life” seems to just about cover it. Naturally, it will evolve into a new chapter along with this move. The land here is not the same as the harsh, wild, hill land two miles away that we spent the last two years living on, and I writing about. We will still be farming that, and things there will evolve, too. The land here, at our homestead, is sheltered, green and wooded. There are old orchards waiting to be cleared from the brambles and a garden waiting to be found and brought back into the light. A kitchen garden with herbs and soft fruits and flowers waiting to be grown. There will be geese and turkeys to join our ducks. Our goats and sheep are waiting to move off the hill for winter and into the woods. There are new stories waiting to be pulled out of the soil and brought to bloom.

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