Tuesday 12 January 2021

Hovel in the Hills by Elizabeth West (1977)


In Hovel in the Hills Elizabeth West describes how she and het husband Alan find their dream home in the country. The book covers the period of their lives from 1965 to 1974. My edition is a paperback from 1981, by which time the book had been reprinted 5 times. It is still in print today.

"The thing we both wanted, and were noticeably short of, was time. Time to think; time to ponder upon what life was all about. Now, if we paid cash for a small primitive cottage and a patch of land we would surely have the basics for a simple life that would not need a very high income to maintain."

Ellizabeth and Alan buy Hafod near Llanrwst in North Wales, for 1650 pounds.
There is no mains electricity, no running water and no sewer. A spring provides water and a solid fuel stove heats the cottage and is used for cooking. They use paraffin lamps and candles and some electricity is provided by their windcharger. And then there is the privy in the garden.
The house and outbuildings require a lot of repair and yearly upkeep. Fortunately Alan seems to be the ultimate handyman (or „botcher” as Elizabeth calls it), so he takes care of all that. Not everything can be solved, however: "during the winter months most people would consider the place unfit for habitation.With the coming of the cold weather, the walls of the cottage in every room often stream with condensation. (…) Following shortly after (…) comes the mould. (…) Any foodstuffs, clothing, shoes etc. left touching an outside wall will become saturated and sprout beautiful little tufts of white fur, and every article in all rooms except the kitchen will be affected by damp."
But they get by, by storing all important things in the kitchen, and anyway, they are not fussy about mod cons, perfectly happy to live this way.

The cottage lies at 1000 feet, making for a short summer season. Also, the winds are fierce, so gardening is a challenge. Nevertheless they create a garden which provides them with most of the food they need. They don’t keep animals, as work takes them away from Hafod every now and again.
Elizabeth delights in wild animals. Her chapters on birds are among my favourites in the book.

Before they bought the house, they were planning to find (part time) work locally, but this turns out to be almost impossible.They advertise in The Lady and work, for a few months at a time, as temporary live-in gardener/handyman and housemaid/nanny/cook for rich people. Even reading this in the 1980’s, this filled me with astonishment, as this was a totally alien world for me, but apparently completely normal in Britain.

They live a very frugal life and are foragers long before this concept becomes fashionable. The book can be read as a manual on how to live on very little money. Elizabeth is at her best when writing about coping for oneself and about plants and animals. What she is not so good at is people. This becomes more apparent in het later books, but even in this book you do get the impression that Elizabeth and Alan Know Best, and everyone else has become a slave to modern badly made gadgets and chemical fertilizers.

Searching the Internet in 2002 I found information by someone who was living in „Hafod” then, giving its name as Bron Haul, at Nebo, Garth Garmon, LLanrwst. I have not been able to find more recent information.


 

1 comment:

  1. This, and John Seymour's Self Sufficiency were THE two formative books which inspired me to want a similar lifestyle. When I read Jeannine McMullen's books I was hooked and the dreams sent me to live in deepest Wales more years ago than I care to remember. I have read this book many times down the years and wondered what happened to them after they left Hafod. (They moved to the Forest of Dean I believe). The paragraph you included about the damp streaming down the walls was what stuck with me too! Hafod means summer dwelling (and pasture) so you can easily see it was never meant to be lived in over the winter! They were tough, I'll say that for them. They weren't anything like the fussy eater I was either!

    I don't think they were people persons, so it suited them to live remotely and "do their own thing" as we used to say. I did wonder what the rich people they went to work for thought of them though!

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