City dwellers could soon be embracing a commune lifestyle – and this is why

Like most people, perhaps, when I hear the word commune, it brings to mind a certain image: Sixties-style hippies, free love, abundant drugs and plenty of facial hair.

So, when my news editor phoned recently and asked me to visit such a place, I was, naturally, packing my bags before we’d even hung up.

Yet Brithdir Mawr – an off-grid community of 10 adults and seven children living off the land in rural Pembrokeshire – is nothing like this stereotype. They’re not even keen on the word commune, as it happens, because of said connotations.

Here, rather, the focus is on sustainability, simplicity and stepping as lightly as possible on planet Earth.

Residents produce almost all their own food, all their own power and – via a couple of compost toilets – manure. “It’s why the raspberries taste so good,” I was told. At nights, they enjoy communal (wood-cooked) dinners and fireside conversation.

For sure, there’s plenty of beards. Undoubtedly, too, some people here know their way round a big fat doobie. But the focus is the environment; of finding a cleaner, healthier way to live; of discovering contentment outside convention.

It is, in short, wonderful.

I spent two days being shown the 80-acre site’s abundant woodland, snacking on fruit taken straight from the bush, and discussing the finer points of milking a goat.

The electricity – provided by solar panels and a wind turbine – went down for a while. But it hardly mattered. “It does you good to be without occasionally,” said Tony Haigh, who’s lived there for 21 years.

But – the big question put to me as I waved goodbye – would I ever consider moving to such a place myself?

How do you say “no” tactfully?

I’m just too much of a soft lad for that lifestyle. I struggle changing a lightbulb; the thought of having to deal with a wind turbine just to switch on the bedside lamp is essentially my worst (darkened) nightmare. Chumps like me need – and want – the city, the town or the village.

But, crucially, perhaps the city needs places like Brithdir Mawr too.

As environmental damage poses an ever more existential threat, our urbanised society needs to find better ways to become more like such communes – organic farming, renewable energies and, yes, compost toilets included.

Yours,

Colin Drury

North of England correspondent