Land-Based Living

Aim

Exploring beautiful, low-impact ways of living that reconnect people to land, community, and the wider circle of life.

Help me explore pathways home to the land

For the past twenty-five years I’ve been asking a single question:

How might we find our way back into richer relationships with the land, each other, and the wider community of life?

I’ve explored that question through philosophy, through natural building, through five years living wild in a Welsh rainforest, through intensive meditation and all sorts of far-out stuff. It's taken me to pioneering land-based projects across Britain, into deep study and reflection on the origins of our current disconnection and the structural patterns connecting the housing crisis, ecological crisis, loneliness epidemic, and the growing sense that the modern world has somehow lost its way.

I’m now working to share what I’ve learned, and to collaborate with others seeking to open up practical, beautiful pathways towards lives that are lighter on the Earth while richer in relationship, meaning and belonging.

If you’ve watched the video above, you’ll already have seen the little roundhouse there behind me.

For me, that building isn’t simply an alternative home.

It’s a doorway into a different way of living.

One organised less around consumption and extraction, and more around relationship, sufficiency and care.

I’d like to help more people discover those possibilities.

Why I’m crowdfunding

I’ve deliberately organised my own life around having very modest material needs.

That means I don’t need a great deal of money to keep doing this work.

It also means that a relatively small amount of support creates a surprising amount of freedom.

This crowdfunder isn’t about launching some grand solution to the world’s problems.

It’s much simpler than that.

I’m asking for support to buy myself time to step more fully into this work.

Time to keep writing.

Time to finish the book I’ve begun.

Time to keep documenting and learning from pioneering land-based projects.

Time to develop practical designs and resources that might help others who feel called towards this way of life.

Time to keep contributing to what I believe is one of the most hopeful cultural movements quietly emerging in Britain today.

What your support will help create

Over the coming months I’ll be developing several pieces of work, including:

• a practical course showing how to build the kind of roundhouse shown in the video
• my book about the five years I spent living in the Welsh rainforest, and how that experience reshaped my understanding of what it means to be one small part of the beautiful circle of life 
• new essays and design proposals exploring practical pathways towards land-based living
• documented visits to inspiring projects across Britain, helping connect the wider ecosystem of land-based practice

Everything I produce will become part of an open body of work exploring how richer relationships with land, community and the living world might once again become more widely accessible.

Rewards

I wanted the rewards on offer to feel like invitations into the work rather than products.

£10+ Access to my natural building course when it launches

£20+ Access to the building course plus read early chapters of my forthcoming book, offer feedback as it evolves, and receive a finished copy when it’s published.

£50+ Everything above, plus an hour together online or in person if you want to come see me in Devon. I’d genuinely love to meet some of the people who resonate with this work. If you support at this level we’ll spend an hour together exploring whatever most interests you—from natural building to systems thinking to your own project.

A final thought

I don’t think any of us knows what a flourishing civilisation a century or two from now will look like.

Nor do we need to.

What we can do is begin living the values that such a civilisation would almost certainly embody: deeper relationships with each other, with the land, and with the wider community of life.

That’s the work I’m trying to contribute to.

If what you’ve found here resonates with you, I’d be deeply grateful for your support.

A few windows into the work

If this project resonates with you, here are a few windows into the wider body of work behind it: essays, photographs, videos, early extracts from my forthcoming book, and practical design proposals exploring pathways towards land-based living.

Read

The Land Keeps the Score

The land keeps the score. It records the quality of our relationship with the living earth more honestly than any economic indicator ever could. In the emptiness of our countryside, in the disappearance of wildlife, and in the fragmentation of our rural communities, the land tells the story of a society organised around separation. But if the land records our history, it can also become the place where another story begins.

Read more →

Land-Based Settlement Design

From the book

Here's a short, lyrical passage from the book I'm writing about my years in the woods. (It's not all as lyrical as this!)

Honey in the Heart

I awaken, as if on wings of birdsong, from dreams woven upon singing waters. It’s dawn, and the sun’s early light is slowly filling the jungly woods.

The music of the morning pours bright and clear through my open door from the woodland clearing in which my little hut sits.

The dawn chorus of the birds, the lively burbling of the mossy stream just outside, and the gentle breeze playing through the leaves of the trees all co-mingle into a harmony of soothing sound, massaging my body-mind into wakefulness.

I love waking up here. There’s simply nowhere I’d rather be. I still can’t quite believe this is my home.

Rising, stepping outside, I pad naked to the small fall in the stream and splash my face and body with its tumbling silver-black water, gasping slightly with the cold.

It’s early summer, but the stream never truly warms up.

Taking the stone goblet from its place beside the fall and filling it to the brim, I offer a brief wordless prayer before slowly drinking down the cold, clear, living water.

I drink in small sips, holding each one in my mouth to warm it before swallowing otherwise it chills the stomach, bringing lethargy. This way it cools only the head, bringing clarity.

Fire in the belly, moonlight in the mind, honey in the heart: an old bardic saying—wisdom distilled.

I crouch there with a sense of awe, watching as the daylight strengthens, listening to the music of the woods, my cold skin tingling, my heart glowing.

The soft aura of the sun crests the horizon—abundant, prescient, serene. As the golden orb itself rises visible between the tree-trunks, a song rises to my lips, joining with the symphony all around. It’s a song of wonder, a song of joy, a song inseparable from this miracle of morning light.

Pierced by a gratitude as sharp as grief, at once humbled and ennobled by the vast beauty of earth and sky, tears fill my eyes and overspill, falling into the dancing stream, carried on towards the sea.

Photos

A few photos from the woodland years, and some from the building of my current little roundhouse home.

My wild hut

In situ

A peek inside

A threshold experience!

Me after 5 years in the jungle

Starting again

Up she goes

The roof structure

Taking shape

Contemplating the plastering work ahead

Getting there

Almost ready for painting

How cute is that?!

Thank you for having a look through these little windows. 

If you'd like to see more of this kind of thing in the world — small-scale attempts to inhabit the earth more gently and beautifully than our current culture even wants to admit is possible — please consider making a pledge and stepping a little deeper into my work.

Stretch target

My immediate funding goal is to raise £2,000 in order to buy myself a couple of months. If I reach that amount, I'll be very grateful and happy.

Thinking bigger though, my annual financial needs are a modest £10,000.

If this crowdfund takes off and I can raise something approaching that amount, it will give me a lot more security, and space to start to put in place some stable long-term sources of funding.

More about my funding goals

As I develop my independent practice, I want to sustain this work in a way that keeps it open, independent, and responsive to what is most alive across the emerging ecosystem of land-based practice. 

To achieve this, I’m hoping to secure a small amount of core funding from aligned partners who can see the value of what I’m exploring.

I’ve deliberately organised my own life around low material needs, which means a relatively modest amount of funding support can create a remarkable degree of freedom.

Why this approach?

Rather than charging for writing, thinking, or collaborations within an ecosystem that’s already financially strained, I want to keep my work as accessible as possible. To achieve that, I need to be free to develop ideas without needing to monetise them, and to contribute to pioneering projects without charging a fee.

What I need

The economics of this work are modest because the economics of my own life are modest. By living small, my economic throughput remains small—at least relative to UK averages. In practical terms, I only need to secure £10,000 per year in core funding to cover all of my personal and work-related costs.

What this enables

Funding of this kind creates the freedom for me to write and explore ideas, develop design proposals in greater depth, visit and learn from pioneering land-based projects, map and strengthen the emerging ecosystem of land-based practice, contribute to collaborations because they matter and not because they pay, and follow what is most alive in the field and help where it’s most needed.

Funding method

All or nothing – this project will only receive pledges if it reaches its target of £2,000 by 23rd July 2026 at 1:10pm