In an idyllic corner of the south Somerset countryside, blackbirds chirrup, cart horses swish their tails and a restless wind susurrates through the boughs of a stand of Douglas firs as a cheery band of twenty-to-fiftysomethings pitch in to gather the hay. But for the reusable water bottles and walking boots, they might be characters in an English pastoral, bowed over their rural labours. “When I came here from Brighton I was surprised by how loud it was,” says Meg Willoughby, 28, a resident of Tinkers Bubble. “I had this idea of the peaceful woodland from fairytales, but farm animals are noisy, and when a hill wind blows through firs they make a crazy cracking sound. Nature is wild, isn’t it?”
Founded in 1994, Tinkers Bubble is England’s leading off-grid woodland community: an experiment in rural living that provides low-impact dwellings and a land-based livelihood to a changing roster of 16 residents. In April, it was granted permanent planning permission by South Somerset council, an achievement heralded as a landmark in off-grid communities’ long attempts to be accepted by mainstream Britain (and its planning department mandarins). They celebrated this success in May with song and home-brewed cider. “Though we’re not big drinkers,” Willoughby says, laughing. “We’re usually back in our cabins with a book by 8pm.”
Named after an ancient bubbling spring at the site’s south-western edge, Tinkers Bubble occupies a 16-hectare (40-acre) parcel of land, eight hectares of which is evergreen forest. It is owned by a community benefit society, and the current residents, most of whom arrive as summer volunteers, are sustained by the income from a steam-powered sawmill, apple orchard and press (which produces a lively dry cider) and cottage food production, including heritage salad leaves. The community’s 20 dwellings and outbuildings are dotted around a thatched communal roundhouse, all sitting amid the lofty firs. As part of their planning permission, the community is thinning the North American conifers, which were planted for timber in the 1950s, to encourage regeneration in the forest understorey – the ground-level layer of shrubs and plants. “It’s lovely to see native yew saplings return,” Willoughby says.
Self-sufficient woodland communities are a fringe phenomenon in the pantheon of “intentional communities” (the umbrella term for social units in which members share a dwelling and lifestyle, encapsulating everything from traditional communes to co-housing projects), says Chris Coates, editor of Diggers and Dreamers: The Guide to Communal Living. “For a start,” he says, “there isn’t much woodland in Britain compared to places like Bulgaria and Romania [popular spots for founding intentional communities]. Plus, if you’re talking about living self-sufficiently in and from a woodland, it’s hard work, and best suits the young and fit.”
He adds, however, that for those willing to take a risk with planning permission, the costs can be less than for bricks-and-mortar alternatives. Coates knows of a number of smaller communities and family groups who “fly beneath the radar”, living in pockets of woodland away from local authority oversight.
Formal land-based communities with a woodland aspect include Landmatters, a rural permaculture co-operative in south Devon, set amid 17 hectares of pasture and semi-natural ancient woodland; Coed Talylan, a 28-hectare community on the edge of the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons), where people live in cabin-style dwellings and run a natural building school and mushroom-growing business; and Brithdir Mawr in Pembrokeshire, a community of 10 adults and seven children on 34 hectares of land, including eight hectares of mature woodland and eight hectares of coppice.
Off-grid discussion groups, meanwhile, bristle with aspirant woodland smallholders looking for land and community members. They include Agatha B, 30, an accountant from Surrey who is buying a pocket of woodland in Wiltshire in the hope of setting up a residential medieval farm. “We want to make it a bit like [open-air experimental archaeology museum] Butser Ancient Farm,” Agatha says. “But a real-life version that people live on.” Woodland off-gridders often speak evocatively of Britain’s heritage of woodland dwelling: from the Forest of Arden’s “melancholy boughs” as the setting for love and intrigue, but also ,shepherds’ hard labour, in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It; and Celtic traditions, in which blackthorn trees are infested by mischievous fairies, ash is nature’s healer and oaks are the sacred old men of the British landscape (the term “druid”, for the Celtic priestly class, translates as “oak man”).
Alex Toogood, 34, has lived at Tinkers Bubble since 2020 and was instrumental in its successful permanent planning bid. Toogood, who is non-binary, was working as an engineer in London when the pandemic struck, and felt disposable. “I realised that if I left my job one day they would slot someone else into it the next,” Toogood says. “I was a cog.”
Toogood arrived at Tinkers Bubble in a lull between Covid lockdowns, via a stint in a Buddhist monastery in Scotland, and here, amid the daily work of tending the vegetable beds and orchards, maintaining the woodland and milking Daisy, the dairy cow, life made sense. “Today everything I choose to do has an impact on the people around me, and on the animals and the land,” Toogood says.
Tinkers Bubble residents coalesce naturally into teams depending on their practical aptitudes, Willoughby says, as we chat in the sunshine during her break from tending her flourishing crop of chervil, calendula and sweet grass. She has also been at Tinkers Bubble for two years, and comes from a family of leftist smallholders (her mum runs a community-supported farm agricultural business near Glastonbury). Willoughby spent several years in Brighton before returning, as she puts it, “to the mother trees”.
A horse team looks after the three horses that are essential to the smooth running of this fossil fuel-free – and therefore car-free – community. There’s also a cow team, who produce milk and cottage and hard cheese, and care for the new community calf, Bjorn. Carpenter Richard fashions the rakes we are using for today’s hay gathering, and vegetable-growers Toogood and Willoughby contribute to Tinkers Bubble’s food self-sufficiency and sell to local shops. “Every day I wake up to birdsong and walk through the woods to milk Daisy – and think how incredibly lucky I am,” Willoughby says. People often drift into Tinkers Bubble in need of nature’s TLC, particularly summer and day volunteers, she says: “They come broken down and, like me, are brought back to life by nature.”
Toogood took over one of the community polytunnels in their first week and dug a pond immediately. “It’s hopping with frogs today, and that makes me proud,” they say.
Jenny Pickerill, an environmental geographer who studies land-based intentional communities at the University of Cardiff, says it’s a mistake to dismiss these projects as vestiges of hippy nostalgia. “It’s easy to project stereotypes on to low-impact rural communes – that they are isolationist, or living in the past,” she says. She believes the opposite is true: “These groups are testing radical ways of living that will have applications for all of our futures, whether that’s innovations such as straw-bale housing – a material that is abundant and perfect for this climate – or hyper-local food chains.”
Toogood believes that a broader shift around environmental issues is making a case for land-based communities. In the latest planning application, Tinkers Bubble “spoke our own language”, rather than attempting to couch their project in “planning department speak”, as they had in previous applications. (They were awarded temporary planning permission in 1998, 2004 and 2016.) The bid was accompanied by letters of support from the local community, who buy Tinkers Bubble juice, cider and salad, and attend craft demonstrations and folk singalongs in the wood. Local relations have not always been as harmonious. In the 90s, when tensions ran high over the rights of travelling communities, rumours spread that Tinkers Bubble residents were drug-users and thieves. “And baby-stealers,” Willoughby says. “Totally bonkers, that one.”
Heather Baker, 34, has lived at Brithdir Mawr since 2019 with her partner, George. Their daughter, Ursa, two, was born in the community, which occupies a mixture of stone and wooden dwellings in 32 hectares of ancient woodland, coppice and pasture in the Preseli mountains of Pembrokeshire, a landscape dotted with the bluestones found at Stonehenge. Brithdir Mawr was granted planning permission in 2008. In 2011, Wales launched its groundbreaking One Planet Development policy, which grants planning permission to low-impact, land-based projects such as Brithdir, which use a fair per capita share of the planet’s resources. Cornwall has been consulting on a similar policy.
Unlike Tinkers Bubble, Brithdir Mawr members work outside the community, some as teachers and nurses, others in land-management areas such as seed production. Baker works 20 hours a week at Brithdir, and also part-time at a Steiner school. It was her first career in maternal mental health in Scotland that prompted Baker to seek out a radical new lifestyle. “I saw so much isolation in new mothers,” she says. “I wanted to bring up my own children as part of a tribe, with other adults and children to help to raise them.”
The best bit for Baker, however, has been working physically on the land. “Whether it’s cutting wood, plaiting onions or milking goats, it all seems to make more sense than my old nine-to-five life, stressed out and living in a small flat,” she says. Part of Brithdir Mawr’s mandate is outreach. The community hosts 80-100 volunteers a year, who arrive as harried city dwellers to camp, or pay to stay in the community’s trailers and wooden cottages, and pitch in with the land and woodland work. “You see the transformation immediately,” Baker says. “It’s ear-to-ear smiles, even if they are just lugging bags of manure.”
Simeon Warburton, 62, has lived at Landmatters since 2012. A musician, he arrived at the 14-strong permaculture community after leaving London to raise his family on the road and in alternative communities. In 2005, Simeon and his wife, Miranda, 54, set off with their son Izzy, five, and daughter Kuki, two, for what they call their years of “road schooling”: “I couldn’t bear the idea of having to get up every day for the school run,” Warburton laughs. Occupied since 2005, Landmatters was awarded permanent planning permission for temporary housing structures in 2016. Life at the community is based on the ethos of permaculture (an approach to agriculture and settlement that seeks to be self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable) and consuming one’s fair share of the planet’s resources. “But everyone interprets that mandate in the way they think best,” Warburton adds.
Landmatters’ eight households live in handbuilt wooden cabins, and each have an annual allocation of two cubic metres of wood for personal and commercial use. Simeon and Miranda make wooden totems from their timber and run a solar-powered recording studio at the site. Izzy, 23, and Kuki, 20, live between Landmatters and city lives: Kuki is a tree surgeon and yoga teacher; Izzy is a blacksmith and record producer. “They had a fortunate upbringing in nature,” Warburton says. “It has turned them into happy and thoughtful young people.” It can be hard, he admits, to live in a land-based community, which demands energy, effort and a good deal of patience of its members, but the reward, he adds, is reconnection to nature’s rhythms and other people.
“My childhood was a life lived in the box of a suburban home,” he says. “Here, life is cyclical: we live among the beeches and oaks, the meadow flowers and insects. In spring and summer we’re busy growing and hosting visitors, and in winter we withdraw and make our crafts.” From his vantage point, Warburton concludes, urban capitalist lifestyles seem odd.
“I get it if you’re working 60 hours a week and winning at that lifestyle and making tons of money,” he says. “Though I would ask if you’re really happy if you’re working all hours at a job you hate and still not making ends meet.”
In Jenny Pickerill’s view, modern rural lifestyles are the strangest of the lot. “There’s this idea that you need a massive car and oil-fired central heating to live in the countryside,” she says. Low-impact communities such as Tinkers Bubble, she says, propose a socially just and nature-sympathetic model of rural living. “They show we can live within woodland and harvest bits of it sustainably. We don’t have to fence it off in the name of conservation.”
Hay slowly piles up in a wooden cart as Tinkers Bubble residents and volunteers break into song. I depart from this rural idyll, somewhat sheepishly, in a petrol-fuelled taxi driven by south Somerset-born Steve, who regards me quizzically when I say I’ve come from Tinkers Bubble. “We used to think they were dopeheads and dogs-on-a-string sort of people,” he says. He pauses. “But I see them these days with their bikes and horses, selling cider and apple juice in the village and – you know what? – I think they have got life about right.”
• For more information about Tinkers Bubble, including details of its annual open day held in the autumn and volunteer afternoons throughout summer, click here. For more information on camping at Brithdir Mawr, click here
