Thursday 29 August 2024

Why we moved to Wales, revisited

 This is a post from April 2018, when I had my small business and Keith and I were happily selling in Hay, set up as windbreaks in the old Butter Market.  

To set the scene, back in 1987, Keith and I were living in Dorset.  Sadly, the house was on a very busy main road (the A350) and we wanted to get away from that and get an old farmhouse to do up, or at any rate, somewhere quieter deeper in the West Country.  We had bought - for just £1! - a big old mirror at Cottees' auctions in Wareham, and could just see that up on the wall in this old dream house . . .



"Last weekend we were back in Hay-on-Wye, selling our wares, and a lovely old lady came in and was asking K if she could hold one of his muskets as she wanted to see how heavy it was.  She had a lively and enquiring mind, and we fell into conversation.  Her name was Jenny Green, and she began to tell me how she and her family had come to live in Wales.  She was a real kindred spirit and we got on like a house on fire and chatted non-stop for about half an hour.  It transpires she had written a book about her experiences and to cut a long story short, a little while later she came back with a copy which I promptly bought from her and read non-stop with great delight.  I can't recommend it enough.  

With the exception of keeping goats, her life has been VERY similar to mine, and when she was wine-making, bread-making, jam-making, foraging, hand-sewing patchwork quilts and growing food, I was right there beside her.  In the early days, frugality and self-reliance also loomed large (fortunately for Jenny, her husband Gordon was a great one for his practical inventions - I could do with borrowing the Gordon Green Patent Roof Tile Replacer right now in fact!!  If you can find this book (there are a couple on Amazon and Ebay), I know you will greatly enjoy reading her story.  I look forward to meeting her again and she knows when we are next likely to be in Hay.

Of course, this has taken me back down Memory Lane 30 years and more, and I have found a few posts from 2012, where I wrote about us moving to Wales.  Revisiting them won't go amiss.  


WHY WE MOVED TO WALES . . .



As I was reading my long-desired book "The Unsought Farm" by Monica Edwards, it occurred to me that she had much to do with us ending up here in Wales.  Her books, house prices going MAD back in 1988 when we finally sold our house in Dorset, and a chance holiday in Carmarthenshire with a penpal back in the early 1970s.

As a child, I had pretty well all of Monica Edwards' childrens' novels, both the Westling ones and the Punchbowl Farm series.  I absolutely adored the Punchbowl Farm books, and wanted to be the heroine, Lindsey.  I wanted to live in an old farmhouse with a double bridle hanging from one of the kitchen beams, and the soft light of oil lamps, and Jersey cows to milk, and have the footings of an old wing of the farmhouse where I could open a long-forgotten door and step straight back through time to the 17th Century.  I wanted Siamese cats, and ponies in Barn Field, and a yew tree to play my recorder in.  As you will probably realize, living in a house on a bus route in suburban Southampton (for all the wild land down the back) didn't quite fit the bill.  It was too late though - I was programmed for life.  Hardwired to country living and historic houses, sloping floors and crooked doorways, still rooms and cellars.  To baking my own cakes and making my own bread.  I am still a dreamer . . . but I have LIVED the dream.

The holiday with the penpal really opened my eyes to what living in the country proper could be like.  She had a sweetheart of a donkey, and a pet sheep called Primrose who had arrived as a lamb to be bottle-fed and stayed forever.  We walked on the marshes beside the estuary, visited the ruins of the once-grand house that was now just soaring brick walls and blind windows, with pigeons nesting where bedroom fireplaces had once been, and a smell of decay.  I remember looking across the estuary through their telescope and watching the Welsh world go by so slowly, ponies at the riding stables across the river being caught up for work, and cows meandering across pastures to be milked.  I recall seeing stars in an inky sky unsullied by neon lights.  No sound of traffic, only the occasional moo of a cow or the hoot of an owl.  Sheepdogs that ran out to attack the tyres of the car as we drove past.  Verges that were a mass of wild flowers I had only seen as occasional specimens, not by the 100 yard length.  The nearest town (Carmarthen) had a market, and no big shops at all, and I was amazed to find that the juke box in the pub we went in had records of HYMNS!!  Being a 20 year old townee, this was really quite a shock!  This really WAS the back of beyond!

When my husband and I decided to move away from the busy main road we lived on in Dorset, our intention was to stay in the West Country, and we house-hunted in Devon and the Cornish borders for an old place with a bit of land, "to do up".   So did the world and his wife!  

We found and fell in love with a small cottage near Beaworthy.  Whilst not the "farmhouse", it was everything I had ever dreamed of - a long driveway planted with Snowdrops and Daffodils, a pretty garden bordered by a stream; a little barn; a greenhouse; an outbuilding just perfect for Keith's woodworking; an acre and a half and buzzards wheeling overhead.  We had a buyer.  We had our offer accepted on the cottage.  We lost our buyer.  And another.  The lady with the cottage HAD to sell.  I broke my heart over that little house.  I kept the details - and the photos taken the weekend we stayed there to cat-sit for the owner whilst she went up to her brother's.  I found them recently, and there was still the pang of loss, although looking back now, it WAS small and we would have had to extend or move on once T had her sister and brother.

Anyway, glumly, without a buyer, we watched house prices rise by the week in the West Country until the sort of property we were looking for was becoming beyond our range, as our house price had stayed the same.  We searched further afield, in the Welsh Marches, Lancashire and what used to be Westmoreland.  "Wales is lovely," I told my husband.  He agreed to include this in our remit, and we sent off for various house details.  One enterprising estate agent in Carmarthen sent a printed brochure of all the properties on its books - and there were SO many.  Then it happened.  We turned a page and a photo of an old shabby white farmhouse literally LEAPT off the page at us.  It had land - 5 1/2 acres - and outbuildings.  The rooms sounded HUGE.  It had potential (a term we were to hear regularly mentioned down the years).  We contacted the estate agent one September day and arranged to go and view it . . ."

20 comments:

  1. The A350 has taken me right back to being a teenager. I was living in Dorchester with my parents when my father took a job in Shaftesbury. I said I’m not going - I had a good job at County Hall and lots of friends so at 18 my home left me! Travelling to Shaftesbury every weekend on the bus was along the A350. Later when my husband to be moved to Lancashire we travelled the length of the A350 back to visit as by then my parents lived near Poole!

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    1. You knew that road well then! It was SO busy even in the 1980s. Lord knows what it's like now. We were just outside of Lytchett Matravers, so lots of "commuters" into Poole and Bournemouth, and lots of lorries. . .

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  2. We should meet up to compare notes sometime!!...living in suburban Southampton...and ending in Wales...selling in the Butter market....!!

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  3. We have so many similarities in our lives, excepting horses, not an animal I have ever really liked ... sorry. When we were looking for our country place to do up and live our country life, we included the whole of England and Wales in our search area, travelling far and wide to view potential homes. We eventually found our Welsh home on Greenshifters.

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    1. When we were looking, it was all printed details and phonecalls, being pre-internet. We viewed one lovely house in Derbyshire, still with the original CI range, wanted to put in an offer only to be told someone had beaten us to it. They didn't tell us THAT before we travelled up from Dorset. We were very open-minded about where we could relocate to but there was already a house with our name on it, waiting . . .

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  4. Its always a bit of a leap in the dark moving to a new to you house. We are going to a very modern 3 bed semi with solar panels on the roof and every mod con you can imagine. The garden is much smaller and easier to keep, so practical for me now as the arthritis in my feet, knees and hands plays merry hell when I've done a lot of gardening. Lots of happy memories in our present house though and we will make new ones. Hugs Xx

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    1. We certainly took a chance with Ynyswen. It could have gone horribly wrong - in a way, things happened that it did and the first 10 years were a bit of a nightmare, before our luck suddenly changed. Your new home sounds a very sensible purchase. I hope you get a moving date soon now. It must be very frustrating waiting about.

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  5. I love just a few metres from the A350 in a village between Blandford and Shaftesbury and it is still a busy road, more so now that the C13 is often closed because of land slip at Melbury. I’ve lived in Dorset for 76 years and will never leave but I understand Wales is still a less expensive option for smallholders. I don’t know why Dorset is so expensive, no M way, no Cathedral, rubbish bus service and miles from a train station, I guess we are supposed to live on wonderful views. Sandra.

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    1. I've just been looking at a map, reliving old journeys. Sometimes we took the Spreadeagle road to Shaftesbury, but when we were toing and froing from Wales back to Dorset, to stay with friends it was drop off the M4, onto the A350 and on it all the way back to the other side of Blandford (our friends were near Sturminster Marshall). I think Dorset is so desirable because it doesn't have a motorway! It's near enough to commute back to London too . . . I don't blame you for not wanting to leave. I hoped for many years we could move back there, or down to Devon, but we were blocked at every turn. We were meant to stay in Wales.

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  6. Oh gosh! I'm loving this....are you sure you don't fancy writing your own book on the subject?!? I'm champing at the bit for the next installment! I have a great weakness for reading people's 'getting away to the country' stories -- not the modern day ones that are more likely to be wealthy people selling giant homes in a metropolis and playing at back-to-the-land-ing -- but ones that feel real and attainable and are motivated by more than just Instagrammable content. (sorry, got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about that it seems!! :)) ~Melanie xo

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    1. I'm right with you, Melanie!

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    2. It has occurred to me, I have to say. It would make good reading. We did what a lot of people did at the time, but should have read between the lines when we got that houses for sale brochure, as so many of them were failed businesses - smallholdings, goat herds, micro-breweries, herb farms and the like. People came to Wales with their dreams, and had them fail. Anyway, another page or two from the memories today.

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  7. I'm so glad you posted this. As a relative newcomer to the party is is lovely to see some of your back story. We share a love of old houses and gardens and antiques. We now live in what is considered a remote community in Canada, no roads connecting to anywhere. We came to visit friends, for one day only, and before we caught the boat out that evening I had run into the estate agents and asked for them to start sending us listings. We ended up on 5acres at the edge of the forest. The picture of the blue trimmed house is calling to me. I feel like if I had been with you we would have clasped hands in delight. Is it the house you lived in before you moved to your current house? I'd love to see more pictures of it too.

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    1. I see you took a leap of faith too. I have to say, it would seem that our lives ARE planned out - perhaps we get a choice early on, but then ours seemed to get set and for whatever reason, we were meant to stay in Wales forever. That photo shows Ynyswen after improvements. You just wait till you see what it was like when we first moved there!! We spent 32 very happy years there. Keith never wanted to leave, but we had to bite the bullet because maintenance was ruinously expensive, heating bills etc (Lord knows what they were costing the new owners when fuel prices shot up).

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  8. Wonderful post, I have to look up the areas were you were to now your home.

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  9. Hello angryparsnip, long time no see. Yes, we lived in the beautiful Cothi valley. It was lovely there. Now we live in another beautiful area and have views.

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  10. I so enjoyed reading this - Thank you - it's been a similar but different journey for us, and quite soon we will be trying to decide if we should relocate within Wales or go back to England ( some grandkids in Devon ) We've lived all over the place but never before experienced the peace that can be found in the Welsh countryside.
    Alison in Wales x

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    1. It's a hard call. Devon is lovely and you have family there. But it's busy, very busy. Tourists and locals. Wales is a lot quieter, but you have to think of it also being a long way to get OUT! It's a hard call.

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    2. Exactly, thanks for your understanding x
      Alison in Wales x

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