going off-grid
The first in a series on the whats and whys of our off-grid, caravan, mountain life
This week we went window shopping. For actual windows. We are building an extension/porch/kitchen/weather break onto our old, falling to pieces, tiny, 18ft caravan—our home for this winter. We bought the caravan in the summer, in a hurry, as the sale of our house was going through and we needed somewhere quick to lay our heads while we moved onto the land.
A move that was a long time coming, but crept and sprung upon us almost by surprise. An opportunity, unprepared, chaotic, last minute, as per our usual race against the seasons and everything else life throws at us. We got here when the devil’s bit scabious bloomed, marking three years since the land became ours. Three years of being stuck in a limbo of to-ing and fro-ing but never getting anywhere, tied by the distance between the land and livestock, our home, our work and families.
Why this land, so wild and rough and far from the home we lived in? First, and most of all, the beauty of it, the wildness that sang to my soul and called me home, as I described in my previous essay, on Becoming Land. Second, it was cheap. I don’t come from a big farming or very wealthy background; land is not easy to acquire for most of us—and I acknowledge my privilege, inherited, earned and sacrificed for, to be able to buy this piece. It is a dream, but it was also a compromise—I couldn’t afford valuable farmland or any land closer to where we lived and my husband’s work (he now commutes over an hour each way daily to his long hours at a physically demanding outdoor job), and we live a very frugal, low maintenance lifestyle to afford the costs of keeping livestock and starting up a farm.
And I could write at length on the topic of land/farming access, entitlements, and the unfairly tight margins that keep farmers and farmland tied up in a system of subsidies and global commerce that tanks local economies and ecologies, but I’ll save that for another time.
Right now, I am quietly revelling in the stillness and mud and rain and triumph of finally being here.
Our caravan leaks. We bought it at the end of a summer of record breaking heat and drought, so we had no idea how badly it would leak until October came with thunderstorms and all the past two summer’s rains at once, and we kept waking up with wet feet. So, while building on our extension/porch/kitchen/weather break we’ve extended the roof to cover right over the caravan, bracing the caravan against the wind and giving it some extra protection from the rain.
Oh, the rain. Perpetual rain. Heavy rain. Driving, North Atlantic rain. Folks, you have not seen rain until you’ve seen Cork and Kerry mountain rain. Think, the top of Dartmoor, or the Lake District, and some.
Our building skills are negligible, neither the husband nor I are skilled in carpentry or construction, we’re working things out as we go, in the rain, making mistakes, learning from them, and calling it a practice run before embarking on bigger, more permanent structures. Right now, we just need to get ourselves through this winter of rain as cheaply and comfortably as we can. When I say “comfortably” I mean the bare minimum of comforts like a roof, a dry bed, something to cook on and room for our two big, hairy dogs. The plan is to build ourselves a permanent cabin with all the mod cons like (off-grid) power and plumbing, down the land, next year.
So, the windows. Second hand, fifty euros apiece from a nearby container refit yard. We need to maximise natural light into our temporary micro living space to help keep our power usage to an absolute minimum. We don’t have a power connection, therefore, we don’t have power to burn. Every watt is counted, literally: we invested in a power bank that can hold 600 watts, along with a 100w portable solar panel to recharge it. In summer, when the sun is at its highest and our power use lowest, we should be able to run most of our usage off solar panels, except freezers which are a big power drain and will need a mains connection—we currently have those plugged in with friends and family and we manage without a fridge—at this time of year, meat and dairy defrosts slowly and stays cold enough outside, in an old disconnected freezer for insulation, for two or three days. But, in winter, the sun is low, we need to charge the power bank from a mains outlet, whenever and wherever we can, just to power lighting for the caravan and devices—our phones and the laptop I’m writing this on. It has given me a new appreciation for technologies like energy saving lightbulbs that burn six watts per hour instead of forty—that saves us a difference in days of power.
For the farm, our few, occasionally used, hot fences are powered by solar fencers (a godsend for remote fencing). We are on rough, open mountain—we have no fields or farm buildings yet, besides the timber cabin we built for the goats—we are building our farm as well as our home, from scratch, from the ground. We collect the currently abundant rainwater for the livestock, saving it up for when (if) the rain ever stops, and they have access to natural streams during wet seasons. But, if the last two extremely dry summers are to go by, we will need to drill a well and install a pump before next summer for them and our own drinking water (for now, we fill containers of drinking water from friends).
Plumbing is a thing of luxury that we know not. A composting toilet, and an outdoor sink with water heated on our gas stove. Showers and clean laundry are rare treats scrounged from people who live with those luxuries. So, if you see me looking like I just crawled out of the hills, it’s because I did.
The land, as I cannot overemphasise because it seems to be hard to grasp until seen, is rough mountain—very exposed, rock, bog and heath. Before we could push the caravan off the road to tuck it behind the overrun hazel hedge that bounds our northern, highest, roughest and most exposed end, we had to fill the ground several feet depth to build hardstanding up to the road and an entrance. We cannot drive any further onto the land until we break rock and build a track, so that is next on our agenda. For this winter, we are exposed to the elements in our rudimentary little shack/caravan on a bog on the top of the mountain. The neighbours have questioned whether we realise how bad it gets up here in winter and told us we are brave and mad.
I have never been one to care much about what the neighbours say. But, the neighbours here have also been most welcoming. They have offered help and services and well wishes and brought us gifts of honey and time, and we are grateful, and welcomed, and we know that we’ll be fine. We will remember this time as "that first winter on the mountain in a leaky 18ft caravan with two wet hairy dogs and no heat, power or plumbing while managing a breeding flock of sheep and goats on the hill with no fences, fields or sheds and it didn’t stop raining and all our things got damp and mouldy and ruined and we got damp and mouldy and sick and nearly ruined…”
And we will laugh. And we will clap ourselves with pride because we held tough and we did it. And we can do anything now.