News: Lammas Ecovillage Ten Years On: Revitalised Land, Some Rocky Relationships

Lammas, the 76-acre ecovillage at Tir y Gafel, Glandwr, Pembrokeshire, now has richly flourishing productive smallholdings, but no longer functions as a fully united, collaborative community venture.

The original nine leasehold smallholdings are now individually-owned freeholds. The original landlord, the not-for-profit industrial and provident society Lammas Low Impact Initiatives, is defunct.

At the beginning hopes were high for a long-term co-operative venture. It took more than two and a half years, from December 2006 until August 2009, for planning permission to be granted. The application was under Policy 52 of Pembrokeshire County Council and Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority, for low-impact development. This was the rather less stringent forerunner, in terms of management and reporting requirements, of the Welsh Government’s One Planet Development policy. The long and painful process was documented  by Tao Wimbush,[i] who with spouse Hoppi was – is — one of the Lammas pioneers. Tao also told the story (as Paul Wimbush) in this 2012 book The Birth of an Ecovillage.

Hoppi and Tao Wimbush’s productive smallholding at the Lammas ecovillage. The photos were taken in summer 2014

 

Once planning permission was granted, nine sets of leaseholders worked hard and creatively to start their low-impact land-based businesses and to build their carbon-neutral homes and buildings of natural materials. Every year, Lammas Low Impact Initiatives submitted a report to Pembrokeshire County Council to show they were meeting the Policy 52 criteria for living from the land and minimising vehicle use.

But by 2017 cracks had split the harmony. Residents on two of the nine smallholdings, who sat on the management committee of Lammas Low Impact Initiatives, wanted to alter their leases. They engaged a solicitor and applied to the Land Registry to register the new leases they desired — but it appears no one else knew until the society received a solicitor’s bill for £2,529.[ii]

The falling out continued. In January 2018 one of the change-seekers wrote to Peter Horton, Head of Planning at Pembrokeshire County Council, accusing unnamed others at Lammas of “bullying and harassment, a total absence of co-operation over the whole site, singling out people and using positions of power to put pressure on individuals to leave and sell up, using public meetings and a wider membership to name and shame individuals, holding large parties without seeking consent of those living close by and bringing in people to drum outside through the night in some cases with large fires and fireworks, allowing damage to properties without liability”.

The letter-writer continued “At times I feel as if others are working to make me leave, while attracting people in with offers of help to find plots”.

The emphasis is on edible plants

 

The conflict meant that Lammas Low Impact Initiatives could no longer publish an annual monitoring report covering all nine smallholdings. The society had published six annual reports between 2010 and 2015, as required by Policy 52 to show how much income their activities both replaced and earned. Since 2016 individuals have compiled their own reports.

Tao Wimbush wrote to Pembrokeshire County Council in March 2018 to explain the developments at Lammas:

“The plots are due to become freehold (rather than leasehold as specified in the planning application), and the common land (including the trackways and Community Hub) is to be transferred to a private company. Lammas will no longer have any role at Tir y Gafel and the Society [Lammas Low Impact Initiatives] will almost certainly be dissolved.”

In January 2018, after featuring on the Channel 4 programme Grand Designs, the nearly-completed home of Simon and Jasmine Dale burned down, and the devastated couple — who were not in the minority group seeking to change the ownership structure — opted to sell up. Simon’s website, simondale.net, carries this news:

“After nearly ten years establishing our low impact smallholding at the Lammas ecovillage in West Wales, we have decided that the time has come for us to sell the holding and have a fresh start. We are now looking for people who would be interested in the opportunity to buy our smallholding which includes:

• Earth-sheltered roundhouse
• Workshop
• Barn
• Planning permission for 3-4 bedroom eco-home
• Large, horticultural glasshouses
• 9 acres in total freehold ownership
• Includes 1.5 acres rewilded forest garden and plant nursery stock
• Renewable hydro-electric supply
• Spring water supply
• 5 acres of private woodland and joint ownership of common woodland
• Community ownership of hub building, surrounds and millpond”

As the advertisement makes clear, ownership of the smallholdings has transferred from Lammas Low Impact Initiatives to the individual former leaseholders. Also the communal woodland, owned at the beginning by Lammas Low Impact Initiatives, is now owned jointly by the new freeholders.

The cost of the Dales’ holding is not revealed in the advert, it is a case of ‘offers invited’.  During 2018 fellow Lammas pioneer Jane Wells ran a Just Giving campaign to raise money for the Dales to rebuild their house, and donors offered £35,270.23. The Dales, though, have decided not to rebuild on the Tir y Gafel site.

Lammas was an ‘intentional community’, a group of people who got together to lead low-impact, living-off-the-land lifestyles. During the initial planning and land improvement phases, the participants pulled together, as they needed to because Policy 52 required a project involving members of more than one family to be controlled by a trust, co-operative or other similar structure in which the occupiers had an interest.

But people’s health, family circumstances and income needs change over time, leading to divergent views about future directions.

Manon Bertrand, of Ghent University, has studied the issue at Lammas. In Conflict and Group Development in a Young Alternative Community: Ethnographic Research in a Welsh Village, translated from the original Dutch and dated 2016-17, Manon writes in the conclusion:

“The findings show conflicts at Lammas originate in external structural features and different values and ideals. Because no clear visions, procedures and guidelines were agreed upon from the start, there aren’t shared meanings and collective goals. This led to different groups with a strong hostility and distrust towards one another. There are a few distinguishable positions among the residents which form a typology based on two dimensions; compromise and investment in conflicts: the invariables, reconcilers and mediators. At Lammas, these are respectively reformists, middle ground people and conventionalists. There’s a strong in-group/out-group thinking between these different groups. Conflict at Lammas is a dynamic process in which recurrent patterns in the group lead on the one hand to consolidation of positions, but on the other hand also to withdrawal and formation of subgroups. This conflict seems to be stuck because no positive, productive group culture was created. Thus conflict isn’t functional in this case because it led to a standstill of the group. Furthermore mediation is difficult because the original conflicts grew into relationship conflicts and there are no procedures or mechanisms to attain a constructive solution.”

“Procedures or mechanisms to attain a constructive solution”: these were not high on the priority list at the start, when a heady sense of pioneer excitement prevailed. By the time their absence was apparent, it was too late to repair the damage to relationships.

The original members of the community invested huge amounts of time and energy in obtaining planning permission. As Paul (Tao) Wimbush wrote in The Birth of an Eco Village (p.151): “The news that we had won planning permission came as a massive, massive relief. In the end it had all been worth it; the anguish, the despair, the long wait had all paid off. We had set a new planning precedent”. For him, it was time to “step back and for others to step forwards” (p.154).

Those steps forwards have followed a different path, towards individual enterprises and away from the initial ideal of a collaborating community, highlighting a weakness of Policy 52 and the current all-Wales One Planet Development policy. The policies assume that people who choose to live off the land will always be able to abide by their management plans and maintain a steady-state rural economy. In reality, over time some One Planet participants will become very successful and want to expand beyond the confines of their smallholding, others will reach peak self-sufficiency and happily stay there, but a number will probably be unable to reach their targets because of accident, illness, infirmity, or even prolonged bad weather.

Pembrokeshire councillor Huw George was on the BBC’s Wales Today TV news programme on April 29^th 2019, worrying that One Planet Developments are not being properly monitored and calling for a halt to new applications. Cllr Phil Baker complained about the workload for planning officers.  The issue appears to be lack of capacity in austerity-hit planning departments, and this is not the fault of people trying to provide their own sustenance and livelihood and doing their best to live within the resources of planet Earth – as will be essential if Wales is to comply with its own Environment Act, which mandates a fall of at least 80% between 1990-1995 and 2050 in net emissions of greenhouse gases.

Dr Erica Thomson, chair of the One Planet Council, commented on Wales Today that One Planet Developments are opportunities for diversification of the rural economy, bringing in different forms of income, and she hoped that more applications would come from existing farmers. “It’s not some green hippy policy,” she said.

Despite the relationship conflicts that hit Lammas, the overall impact on the land has been entirely beneficial. The 76 acres of Tir y Gafel have been transformed from sheep pasture to ecologically diverse production on improved soils, with the emphasis on fruit, vegetables and forest gardens. The holdings are off-grid, with electricity from hydro and solar power. These are big, continuing positives, no matter what has happened to the ownership structure.

Array of panels for solar power

 

Tao and Hoppi Wimbush and their two children, whose Maes Melangell smallholding covers 7.2 acres, produced 68% of their food from it in 2017, plus produce sales of £3,494, and £4,164 from land-based education and consultancy. That was more than enough to live on. They have a private water supply, private drainage, generate their own electricity, and use their own wood for fuel much of the year. If everyone lived as they do, we would need only 0.79 of a planet.

Looking ahead, Tao says he expects the eco village to continue to grow in biodiversity, productivity and wellbeing. “We have already played an important role in exploring and demonstrating the viability of a one-planet lifestyle on marginal agricultural land,” he said. “After 10 years the change in landscape, microclimate and ecology is astounding. The feedback that we get from our guided tours and courses is that Lammas inspires hope that we, as human beings, can transform our relationship with the natural world for the better.

“Having said that, it has not been without its challenges and struggles. Life is full of unexpected twists and turns. Whilst the majority of residents are very settled and happy here some people have still to move out of temporary accommodation into their final dwellings. It takes courage, stamina and resources to build the infrastructure necessary to support a sustainable land-based lifestyle from scratch.”

Lammas has shown that it is “possible to transform depleted upland pasture into a biodiverse ecology that supports a small community in meeting all their basic needs from the land base”, Tao added. “We are not perfect, and we still have a long way to go, and we are walking our talk,” he said.

 

[i] http://lammas.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The-Process.pdf

[ii] Affordable Homes and Sustainable Livelihoods in Rural Wales, Calon Cymru Community Interest Company, 2017, p.92

PDR

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