Graig Ddu & Me
This cottage is a unique place to develop your purpose, your vision and your Self, as I discovered.
It wasn’t so much a case of love at first sight – I hadn’t lived without electricity before, and the cottage was pink! I wasn’t sure which would be more of a challenge. It was definitely a case of it finding me, though. After 4 years of travelling, I was very familiar with synchronicity, but in the 2 years since coming home, somehow the magic of it had drained away into the floorboards. But as I arranged to go and look at the cottage, I could feel synchronicity around me.
Graig Ddu is hidden away in the depths of the forest. Invisible. In 1991 the mature Douglas firs and Western Red cedars towered above the cottage, the closest ones no more than 50 feet away from the back wall. And I still remember pulling off the road, uphill onto the track into the forest for the first time. The gravel crunched beneath the wheels. Reminding myself of the directions, to go right at the fork. Up and up, hard left around the hairpin bend, still climbing and then opening into a small clearing in the trees where I got my first glimpse of the cottage.
As soon as I stepped inside, I knew this would be home. I agreed to rent the cottage for 6 months over the winter to regroup.
Alongside no electricity and water from a mountain spring there was a battered old coal-fired stove in the kitchen, a Victorian range in the sitting room and paraffin lamps and candles for lighting.
When the Spring came, I wasn’t ready to leave so I negotiated to stay for a bit longer…… and I never left!
Soon after I moved into the cottage, I bought a chainsaw, collected my own firewood, & did what plumbing I could. I taught myself to build the coiled and burnished pots I had kept in my mind, often by candle-light on gloomy days.
I drove a 52-seater school bus through the lanes of Herefordshire. I farmed sheep in the Black Mountains for 8 years
I loved it.
There is a distinct timeless quality about being at Graig Ddu. My life has been entwined with it ever since 1991. It’s been my grounding and my teacher. The garden and the mountains have been my inspiration, sometimes my solace and always somewhere to feel exhilarated and at peace.
Being at the cottage can teach you more about yourself in 7 days than you may have discovered over a lifetime.
