大象传媒

It’s a decade since a group of people in Pembrokeshire won planning permission to build a community of smallholdings designed to be low impact and self-sufficient.

Residents in the Lammas eco village in Glandwr, near Crymych in Pembrokeshire produce their own power and fuel, harvest their own water and food, and try to live ethically.

大象传媒 Radio 5 Live reporter Rory Carson has been to meet some of them for 5 Live's Cool Planet season.

Tao is one of the founding members of the eco village. He grew up in Berkshire and went to Cardiff University to study architecture. While he was there, during a summer break 25 years ago, he discovered TIPI valley - an eco community in South Wales - and has been living alternatively ever since.

“It involves a lot of freedom. We get up when we want. We do what we want. It’s an incredibly liberating lifestyle. We’re not encumbered by heavy mortgages or 9-5 jobs. If the sun is shining we can work in the gardens, if it’s raining we can do paperwork.

“The Lammas eco village is about creating a stepping stone so that people can transition from a mainstream lifestyle to live a land-based sustainable one. It’s about creating a route so that people can get out of the rat-race really and do something that’s a bit more fun and liberating.

“We know how to build healthy natural homes. We know how to generate electricity through renewables. We know how to compost using organic waste.”

Hoppi is an artist originally from Lancashire, she lives with Tao and together they have a menagerie of geese, ducks, dogs, goats, doves, cats and fish.

“Sometimes you can get difficult weather, which can be hard with harvests. Sometimes we have an abundance of tomatoes and hardly any onions. Other years we’ve had a shedload of cabbages and very few apples. It changes every year and we’re just learning to be really creative with what is grown or flourishes in any particular year.”

“Winter, I probably see more of my neighbours than I do in summer. In the summer everyone is so busy on their own land and with their own volunteer team. We’ll come together for certain celebrations but other than that we don’t really see each other much but that’s fine.

"There is an old adage, 'I don’t want to hear my neighbour but I want to see the smoke of their chimney'. In the dark months, that tends to be when we come together and play poker or have a big feast.”

Cassandra lives on a plot of land with her husband and three children. She runs a willow-weaving business and teaches people to weave baskets and sculptures as well as working in local schools. In the mid 1990s she graduated with a degree in Environmental Science and wanted to show people how to lead a more sustainable lifestyle.

Her eldest son has autism and a learning disability and she says she wanted him to feel safe: "We were in London at the time and you couldn’t let him out the door without the potential of things going wrong. We wanted to live in a community for our son, and it had to be an ecological community of some sort.

“Life never really stops and occasionally you have times like last summer when there was no hydropower for a couple of months because we ran out of water.

"You can’t do your laundry in the normal way. I have a solar panel but it’s not big enough to power a washing machine so you have to reassess your life on a continual basis and, I love this part of it, but you’re very much connected to the elements."

In 2018 one of the Lammas houses, which had been featured on the TV show Grand Designs, was destroyed by a fire.

Cassandra says: “It was our volunteer who actually found the fire first. I think we’re all still in shock a little bit. That was four years of his [Simon’s] life up in smoke. It was terrifying.”

Saara has been living at Lammas for eight years with her partner, and they have two young children. They are currently living in a caravan while they build their house.

“It is quite enjoyable to be able to form your own timetables and schedules. There is an awful lot of work to do and around the children it sometimes feels pretty impossible. If I had a normal 9-5 job after that I would be free and I wouldn’t need to think about anything related to the work whereas here the job is all around me. Everywhere I look there are more jobs that need to be done.

“Because we live in a caravan rather than a house you really feel the elements. When it’s windy the whole caravan moves and when it’s cold we really do have to burn the firewood to keep warm.

“Some people get on better with each other than other people. We have quite a lot of fights and squabbles and differing opinions about stuff but again that’s human nature isn’t it? There is quite a lot of policing each other going on here, people have certain opinions of how to live this lifestyle and they would like all of us to live it in the same way, but I also think it’s quite normal.”

Marian has been here since the start with her three children aged 14, 12 and 10. When she moved here with her former husband, their youngest child was just nine months old.

“Having no electricity is such a hugely different experience to anything I’d had before, and I love electricity. We still have a limited supply, but it’s on and off. That has been a huge challenge.”

“Bringing up kids here has been a positive. I don’t know if I could have done it without seeing how much my kids have benefited from it, to see what a wonderful upbringing they have had to have that incredible freedom. They’re free to go wherever they want and get off on their bikes.”

“Our community maybe didn’t start with quite clear enough parameters. You’ve got a lot of strong minded and strong-willed people who have very strong opinions who aren’t necessarily totally equipped to compromise. It gets quite heated and difficult but equally even if the politics gets quite difficult there is also a lovely sense of community. You know people send out messages like has anyone got a car I could borrow? Or can anyone lend me this? There is all that which is really positive.”