The Way Home Read online

  ~

  I first met Kirsty in an enthralling, picturesque place called Schumacher College in Devon. Founded in 1990, it was named after the British economist E.F. Schumacher, best remembered for the classic book Small is Beautiful. She had been running a café at Alby Crafts and Gardens in Norfolk, where she was born and bred, but had slowly come to the conclusion that business wasn’t adding anything to her own bottom line: happiness. Most of the time she found herself stressed, working every hour God sent and wondering what the hell she was doing it all for.

  I was running a week-long course called ‘Wild Economics’ with a friend, the wild food forager Fergus Drennan, and she had come on it to explore other ways of making a living, ways that required little or no money. She had only decided to join the course at the last minute. It was a decision that was to have the most unexpected results.

  We clicked instantly. I would find myself scanning the canteen, on breaks between sessions, looking to see if there was an empty seat beside her. We would stay up late talking, putting the world to rights. Her wide, deep brown eyes had a distinct sense of wonder that made you want to be in her company. We quickly fell in love. I once read that ‘love is the recognition of beauty’. I saw many beautiful qualities in her – she was kind, playful, thoughtful, generous, she stood up for the people and things she cared about – that I had never encountered alongside such honesty before, and I felt blessed to have met her.

  Within months we had begun creating a life together here. Neither of us had any idea how it was going to work. Kirsty was a wanderer who followed her heart, a dancer and performer who ran venues at festivals like Glastonbury. She had been wanting to live in a healthy relationship with the natural world, but had never before attempted to live directly from her immediate landscape and was uncertain about how she might find it. I was the stable, rooted sort who thought that mega-festivals like Glastonbury were an ecological travesty. But as every wild river needs solid banks, we felt that our differences could complement each other. Time would tell.

  At that moment, all I did know was that I loved her, and that I would love her until my last breath, no matter how things would unfold.

  ~

  Kirsty and I had been living in the farmhouse for almost a year when we decided to build the cabin. As I had previously lived in a 12-by-6-foot caravan for three years in England, living in a farmhouse felt luxurious at first. But I soon found that its conveniences – switches, buttons, automation, sockets – were holding me back and discouraging me from learning the skills I wanted to learn and which I felt were an important part of the future, or mine at least. With electrically pumped running water on tap, I never bothered to walk to the spring.

  In the farmhouse I found it difficult to look real life square in the eye, when electricity, fossil fuels and factories were taking care of it all for me. Having too much convenience is certainly a First World problem, but that doesn’t make it any less of a problem, or one whose reverberations aren’t felt in every nook and cranny of the planet. In the caravan I’d had a strong, direct relationship with the landscape around it, but now I felt like I was living vicariously through a seductive array of generic, functional gadgets. It occurred to me that perhaps the law of diminishing returns applied to comfort too, and that in the unceasing trade-off between comfort and the feeling of being fully alive, I was failing to find the right balance.

  I wanted to feel alive again. Kirsty felt the same, though she articulated the urge to do so in her own way. We decided to let out the farmhouse, rent-free, to an eclectic collection of heretics – a yogi, two sailors, an anarchist, a circus performer and a musician – who wanted to live on the land, too. They all had their own reasons for wanting to be here, but a common thread connecting us was the feeling, understood in different ways, that something was deeply wrong with modern society, and that somehow we needed to reconnect with the natural world again, as much for our own sake as for nature’s. This more collective approach to smallholding had been the vision for the place from day one.

  With the cabin plans drawn up, the realities of the often-romanticised, so-called simple life were hitting home, the prospect of which aroused mixed feelings. We intended to be in and unplugged by winter, but first there was the small matter of building the cabin.

  ~

  Sunday evening. It had taken me all week to dig out and level the foundations for the cabin. Twenty tonnes of hillside, shifted by spade. Just as I was clearing up for the night and thinking of a hot shower – might as well, while you still can, my body argued – a friend called over for a game of chess, his usual elaborate excuse for a glass of unusual wine (oak leaf on this occasion) and a chat. He said that he had heard that I was giving up technology, or something like that. Depends on what you mean by technology, I replied, but yeah, something like that.

  He seemed genuinely concerned, not so much for me as for our friendship. How were we going to meet up? The same way we once did, I told him. Curious, he questioned me on the finer details – Email? Fridge? Internet access at the library? Clock? Running water? Gas? Public pay phones? Chainsaw? Wind-up radio? – to which I, in various ways, said no. As the conversation went on – it wasn’t the first time I’d had it – he looked quite concerned for my welfare, too.

  We’ve known each other since childhood, but there was a big gap in the middle, during which time we had taken different paths. He asked me why on earth I would do that to myself. Enjoy life, he said.

  But that was the problem. I had stopped enjoying life. On one level I was enjoying blenders and toasters and once-unimaginable power, but I wasn’t enjoying life.

  I told him that I wanted to put my finger on the pulse of life again. I wanted to feel the elements in their enormity, to strip away the nonsense and lick the bare bones of existence clean. I wanted to know intimacy, friendship and community, and not just the things that pass for them. I wanted to search for truth to see if it existed and, if it didn’t, to at least find something closer to my own. I wanted to feel cold and hunger and fear. I wanted to live, and not merely to exhibit the signs of life; and then, when the time came, to be ready to go off into the woods, calmly and clearly, and let the life there feed on my flesh and bones, just as I had done on theirs. Crows eating out my eyes, a fox gnawing at my face, a feral dog chewing on my bones, a pine marten making good use of my leg meat. It only seems fair.

  While all of that was true, I kept the more important ecological, geopolitical, social and cultural reasons to myself. God knows, I could have offered up a few: the mass extinction of species; widespread surveillance in our bedrooms and pockets; resource wars; cultural imperialism; the standardisation of everything; the colonisation of wilderness and indigenous lands; the fragmentation of community; climate catastrophe; the automation of millions of jobs, and the inevitable inequality, unemployment and purposelessness that will ensue (providing fertile ground for demagogues to take control); the stark decline in mental health; the rise in industrial-scale illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, depression, autoimmune diseases and obesity; the tyranny of fast-paced, relentless communication; or the addictiveness of the hollow excitement (films, pornography, TV, new products, celebrity gossip, dating websites and 24/7 news) that exists behind our screens, the goal of which seems to be the monetisation of our distraction. Etc. But no one really wants to hear those – they’re too preachy, too negative, too true – and so I poured us both another glass of wine instead.

  After only a handful of moves we decided to abandon the game of chess, and re-corked the bottle of wine for another evening. He had to be up at 6 a.m. for work, and I had to start gathering round wood poles for the cabin.

  ~

  It had been a tough-but-rewarding day. My feet were begging to get out of their boots, my back was glistening with salty sweat, my mind was clear and at peace. But the day had a bit to go yet. The sun was slowly cooling, so I took my neighbour’s dog for a walk and went wandering in the woods, searching for the following day�
��s building materials. I must have been gone a while, for both the light and my legs were beginning to fade, when I came upon exactly what I had been rummaging around for, every evening, for weeks. It was laid out so perfectly I wondered if it had been patiently waiting for me.

  Stretching out 13 metres, the tree had, from what I could tell, blown over in the remorseless storms two winters earlier, its shallow roots unable to withstand one of the most tumultuous seasons Ireland had seen in many years. Having been suspended shoulder-height off the forest floor by a couple of neighbouring beeches, it was seasoning nicely.

  Being a Sitka spruce, it was as straight as anything gets in the natural world, meaning it was tailor-made for what I needed: a roundwood ridge pole for the cabin, under which we hoped to spend our days. It was the combination of these qualities that persuaded me that it was finally time to round up an eight-strong crew of sylvan pallbearers to help bestow on it the respect that all life deserves.

  That was the upside. The downside was that we had to get this cumbersome log out of the woods and down to where the cabin was growing up out of what grew around it. That involved carrying it up and down wet, boggy furrows for 300 metres, over an old stone wall, across a road and through an acre of copse to its final resting place. Even seasoned it weighed as heavy as an unkind remark, and all we had for the job were hands, shoulders, knees and pigheadedness.

  But that was the deal.

  ~

  Taking it slowly, half an arm’s length at a time, Kirsty, a friend and I raised the ridge pole 4 metres into its new home, resting on top of a timber frame that would eventually give structure to lime-rendered, straw bale walls. Its sheer mass asked hard questions of every muscle, ligament and doubt in our bodies. As it should. We were told that some heavy machinery with forks could have done the job in half the time, and with just one person. But it felt good, important even, to raise this centrepiece together.

  Over the following weeks, the roof took shape; sawn spruce boards with waney edges were overlapped above young, thinned-out spruce rafters, on top of which went the topsoil that we had dug out from the foundations a month earlier. Into this we broadcasted a wildflower-and-grass seed mix which, when they grew and blossomed, would blend the cabin gently into the landscape.

  For all their beauty, wild roofs are not straightforward. One afternoon I climbed up onto the roof to fix a minor drainage problem. Looking around from that vantage point I could see the pattern of the place for the first time. It was a tightly woven fabric of people, wildlife, streams, fields, insects, trees, rocks and plants of which I was but one thread, no more or less important than the others. This place was no silk robe – it was more like the kind of Aran sweater that fishermen wear, but it felt hand-crafted, homespun, rough around the edges and full of warmth. Sitting up there on the roof, surveying the landscape anew, I found a fresh sense of appreciation for this forgotten place in which I was slowly sending down roots.

  Nestled in, as I was, among the dunnocks, bullfinches and robins perched in the alveoli of an old beech whose canopy partially sheltered the cabin’s roof, my mind couldn’t help but map the landscape around me. As I did so, I felt my own sense of self diminish within it.

  To my right, as I faced the afternoon sun, lay our vegetable garden which, once our cabin-building was complete – would that ever happen? – was ready to provide us with roots, leaves, beans, courgettes and anything else that might do well in this soil and climate. When we first arrived here this patch had gone wild, or what is commonly called ‘overgrown’. There had been a polytunnel on the spot below me, until we took it down and gave it to a friend, a market gardener who, despite thinking we had gone mad, was delighted to make use of it. I had two reasons for this. One, I no longer wanted to build dependencies on technologies whose manufacture I felt showed no respect for life. Two, both Kirsty and I wanted to live on an Irish diet – what this land can naturally provide without recourse to things like plastic – for better or for worse. We wouldn’t be long finding out, but we were under no illusion that it would be easy, especially in times of great biospheric change.

  It was this overgrown vegetable garden that had convinced me to move here in the first place. I remember the first moment I snuck my way into it through a shaded, secluded track arced by sweet chestnut, elder and hawthorn, where I came eye-to-eye with a handsomely fed stag who had been freely munching on wildflowers, grass and blackberries.

  Considering that I ate a vegan diet at the time, and had always admired this fine beast’s kin, I could not have known, as he stood there proudly in the reddish hue of an August sunset, that I would one day kill, skin and butcher some of his kind so that I, and the small woods I had planted, could live.

  Right then I just stared in awe; of his form, his vitality, his gentleness and of that untameable look in his eye. It wouldn’t be until a year later, when I would read Aldo Leopold’s essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ and attempt to live from these lands myself, that my thoughts on life and death would change dramatically.

  ~

  On the opposite side of the cabin sits our hostel, The Happy Pig, which I built, during my second year here, out of local materials using natural building techniques, such as cob and cordwood, wattle and daub, roundwood and sawn spruce, and where visitors can stay for free. It is run in the spirit of a bothy, and it sometimes doubles or triples up as an event space and a sibín – a traditionally illicit pub made licit by the fact that any homebrew is served gratis. Through word of mouth alone it has become a halfway house, sanctuary or retreat for countless people who, for various reasons, long for reconnection with wilder places, or with the wild within themselves. We originally considered creating a website for it, but we were already too busy as it was, and I no longer wanted to go down that road anyway. There’s got to be somewhere, after all, that isn’t on the internet.

  Head east past this hostel, through the nuttery and the potato field, and you come to the home of my nearest neighbour, Packie: a small white bungalow built in the 1950s to house rural bachelors. Packie is one of a dying breed of character, an endangered species who has that roguish glint in the eye you can only get away with when you hit your sixties. His face, like this place he never leaves, is well-weathered, showing all the signs of laughter and regret. What’s left of his white hair is usually wild, except on Sundays, when you would barely recognise him.

  I recall, on one of the first days after I moved here, having to write an article about ‘gift culture’ – a dry term anthropologists use to describe the myriad ways in which the first peoples organised themselves without money or barter – for a newspaper I’ve long since forgotten the name of. I spent all morning and afternoon working on the article, tapping plastic buttons to extol the many virtues of this natural form of economy.

  The following morning, as I went to stretch my legs and get the lie of the land, I noticed that the field of grass I had scythed a few days earlier had been mysteriously cocked into neat mounds of hay. No one seemed to know how until the next day, when a rumour slowly got around that Packie, whom I had not properly met at that point, had been seen in our field, hay fork in hand, before the sun had even come up over his house.

  He hadn’t said a word to anyone.

  ~

  To the south of the cabin grows a young orchard of apples, autumn olives, plums, sea buckthorn berries, pears, quinces, redcurrants and cherries, with some other useful plants like flax dotted here and there. Not all enjoy the poor-draining clay soil that defines life in these parts. Keep walking through this orchard and you eventually come to a quiet road – except, that is, at around 8:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. – which separates our smallholding from a stand of twenty-year-old spruce, itself bordered by a thin, deceptive belt of native broadleaves and an old thick stone wall of a pre-revolution, aristocratic estate.

  This forest – perhaps ‘tree farm’ is a more apt term – was planted by man with timber and bottom lines in mind, yet it still has a distinct sense of wildness about it. It
provides good homes for red squirrels, pine martens, hen harriers and wood mice (an important food source for native predators here). Just beyond my sightline were the places I would soon be foraging in with intent, skulking around picking sorrel, burdock root, chanterelles and wild raspberries. It is no cornucopia – few man-made forests in temperate climates are – but if you know where to look and what to look for, going for a walk with the dog can become part of your livelihood.

  ~

  On all other sides, we’re surrounded by fields of grass and tufts of dark green rush, the latter hinting at the clay beneath. This area is commonly considered to be marginal land, but I prefer to think of it as land misused by a society with marginal ecological understanding. Not so long ago it was a vast oakwood, the kind my generation finds it hard to even imagine today.

  Derrybrien – a nearby village which, to the untrained eye, looks suspiciously like a pub – was anglicised from its old Irish name, Daraidh Braoin, meaning ‘Brian’s Oakwood’. It was here that a legendary High King of Ireland, Brian Boru, is said to have trained his men for some of his many battles with invading forces. As I sat on the roof I wondered what Boru would have thought of this modernising Ireland, and whether or not it was something he would still have given his life to defend.

  All of this is connected by a network of narrow back roads – what we call bóithríns – with wild, unkempt verges and postcardish strips of green grass running up the middle. Take the corner at the end of our bóithrín and you come to Kathleen and Jack’s house. Kathleen is a small, hardy woman in her late sixties who possesses the enthusiasm for life of a six-year-old. She looks like she has popped out in 3D from a 1920s postcard, especially in winter when she wears a shawl around her head. Jack is older, in his eighties, and is now unable to do the things he used to – the neighbours have often told me ‘he was some worker in his day’ – which I notice sometimes frustrates him. Whenever someone from our smallholding goes down to help them bring in the turf or get Jack back on his feet after he has fallen over, he invariably tells us how he wishes he could do something for us in return. I remind him of all the times, when we first moved here, that he used his tractor to start our dodgy old camper van, and that every day I drink from the spring that emerges from their land. The conversation inevitably turns to Gaelic football, and all ridiculous notions of debt are forgotten.