….after a good hitch and a train ride from Devon to Dorset we arrived at Monkton Wyld Court – a community of about 10 adults who run this beautiful Victorian rectory as a centre that offers courses in sustainable living, offers b&b, hires the place out and runs a nursery for kids.
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
It felt like quite a flying visit, only really 4 full days work before we left on the Friday lunchtime. (We have decided that we will stay everywhere we go in the Autumn for at least a week, just to avoid that sense of hardly settling before you move on again.)
Despite the short stay we had a lovely time here – the highlight was helping Simon Fairlie (well known in the ‘back to the land’ movement and Editor of a magazine called The Land) with traditional haymaking. We came in at the end of the process - the building of the rick.
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
Before this stage Simon and other volunteers had sythed the grass, by hand (!) and then turned the grass every day over five dry days which dries it fully and turns it from grass to hay. Our job was to rake all the hay together into piles...
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
...and then hoist a pile vertically above our heads and process it up to the rick, where someone was waiting on top to arrange it once we’d tossed it on.
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
The walking slowly with the hay above your head felt really old fashioned and meditative in a way – but not the easiest afternoon’s work we’ve done!
The other really interesting thing we learnt about was their sewage system – through a set of reed beds. So this means that they don’t have to rely on the mains sewage system at all – it’s all processed on site by flowing through a series of pipes, sludge tanks, gravel systems and then reed beds – at the very end the outflow helps fertilise a load of fruit trees at the bottom of the hill. The system actually needs upgrading so we hope to go and help with this work when it happens. We would then really understand how one of these systems works for our future place – we have weird aspirations such as having a place with its own spring water and its own sewage system – totally off grid for water, pee and poo!
In terms of how it felt as a community it was a very different set up from the others we’ve been at – they are actually all employed and paid (board and lodgings plus £50 per week in cash) to live there, each having a specific area such as cooking, housekeeping, grounds, maintenance, office etc etc. Here's the amazing lavender hedge in front of the house...
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
So there is a feeling of it being partly a community of like-minded people and partly a group of people who live together because they have jobs with accommodation. One of our jobs was to help the housekeeper with keeping all the b&b rooms cleaned - here's a picture to treasure!
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
Whilst some were very committed to their future at Monkton Wyld there was also a sense that some of them weren’t making their long term lives there, it felt a bit more transitory in terms of the rootedness of some of the members - but in reality there is always someone thinking of moving on in any community. A sense of longevity was still very much there in the buildings and the grounds though – especially in the walled garden which was an incredible half acre or so of productivity and food.
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
On our last morning we had a visit to a neighouring farm called Five Penny Farm, to help with some weeding - there’s always weeding! This place was interesting in lots of ways but the thing we loved was that they had fundraised to build a wooden, thatched barn which now acts as a centre for local smallholders to process their produce in.
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
The barn contained:
• a dairy
• a meat processing room
• a huge old apple press - it was amazing!
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
• a catering kitchen
• plenty of storage
• some office space
Local smallholders just pay a small amount to be part of a cooperative and then they can book to use it whenever and only pay to cover costs. This is great because if you are going to sell sausages, cheeses, juice etc etc they have to be made in a hygiene certified place and it’s really hard for small outfits to do this – so by fitting out one place up to scratch and allowing everyone to use it they have created such a useful community resource – and a totally beautiful building too.
We were very relaxed when we left Monkton Wyld, the vibe had been really chilled out and friendly and it had been fascinating to be at our fifth community (after Laurieston, Eigg, Brithdir Mawr and Lammas) and to have seen yet another entirely different model of community living – the real notable feature here being specialization – everyone having their own area which they have full responsibility for.
Here's us on the morning we left...
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| From Monkton Wyld Photos |
The other lovely thing here was the good links with neighbours in the area – through the nursery, community groups who use the centre, Five Penny Farm and other farms – so Monkton Wyld definitely feels like a community that is very rooted in the area and loved by people who come there.
