Where We're At

a short update

Glitter Sparkle, the happiest house goat there ever has been, churning sweet spring rush tips into kid meat and cream.

Hello and welcome to new subscribers. I’ve seen a flurry of new names landing over here since Adam Wilson’s kind share a few weeks back. Thank you, Adam. Adam’s stories are a wonderful inspiration to me as this little farm continues to evolve into… something yet to be defined. When I began writing this little blog here on Substack, we had just sold up our run-down cottage on an acre in the lush, silage-green lowlands, paid off our mortgage, given most of our stuff away, and moved into a leaky caravan plonked atop the wild, heathered, hill land we had been farming for a few years, where our sheep and goats ran through summers. We didn’t know where our off-grid adventure would lead. We were winging it on a giant leap of faith, simply trusting that we needed to be on the land, with the flock and herd, and not twenty miles away in a cruddy little cottage on an acre that we had no time to make a home in, driving daily to and fro to tend the animals and work the land.

For two full years spanning two wild, wet winters and two soaring, dry summers we lived on the land in that leaky caravan and a rough little lean-to kitchen—our “shepherd’s hut”. We lived rough, without any modern comforts or amenities. We rose and set with the sun, and spent long winter nights cosied up by candlelight, listening to the weather beat against the thin walls of our little hut. When the rain drove in torrents that flooded our shallow, peat soils and gushed from the wetlands we bathed in the floods and filled tanks and barrels and caught every drop we could. And when the summer sun soared we hauled those barrels of rain to the sheep and the goats on dry, scrub pastures and our skin cracked like the parched, peaty crust of the land. We learned to live with the land, not just on it. We learned to deal with our own shit, both literally and figuratively.

We learned hard lessons. Humbling lessons. We learned what really matters in this life. It took us down to our core. Farming is good at bringing us back down to earth, back down to the mud and blood that we’re made of whenever we get a little bit too full of our own hot air.

Mostly, that wild, hill land that would not be tamed or manipulated, that offered no riches nor respite from the ravages of the weather, taught us to forget everything we thought we knew about managing land. Land that belongs no more to us than to the chaffinch who sat on the fencepost calling for his love outside our caravan window, or the ravens who scouted overhead for carrion on the open hill, their wingbeats pulsing on the wind. We just get to live here for a while and be part of the dance. And what a gift every heartbeat of it is!

Summer on the open heathered hill.

And then, when we were ready, the gods conspired and with a bolt of lightning gave us an old, stone farmstead (minus the house which really was hit by lightning), in a green and sheltered, wooded dip right here in the hills, just a stone’s throw from the untameable, open, hill land that taught us to be humble and wild. We’re still figuring out how we might carry the lessons we learned into this ancient little overgrown and tumbledown farm that holds the memories of generations of farmers, the tales from times when farming worked with the land and locality still threaded through the crumbling stone walls and sung by the blackbirds, nestled in the heart of a tight little community of old-school hill folk who still remember how to be neighbours, and how we might live with and tend this land in a way that feels right, in a way that nourishes us and the land in reciprocity and community. It seems like the goats are leading the way. They’ve already made themselves of service to the neighbourhood as bramble munchers and now they’re busy churning early spring greens into kid meat and cream.

Right now is kidding season, and over the past three weeks whilst my hands and attention have been full with snuffling, wet newborns and milky, magnificent mother goats, with no time or mental energy to write, I shared an essay I wrote early last year for the Nature Chronicles Prize. The essay describes the land we spent those two years living on in our rough shepherd’s hut and can be found in three short parts here. I was honoured for my essay to make it onto the long-list among some incredible literary talent, but I don’t think I’ll enter a writing competition again. That’s not the direction I want to take with my writing. I’m not interested in writing to appease an audience, nor for my words to be bound—stifled—by the terms of competition. Better to let the words flow from the heart, and trust that they meet with whom they’re meant to.

The stories I write here are the stories that emerge as our little farm evolves and we learn to live in right relationship with land and community. I hope you find something of value in them.

Grá,

Carly

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