In an extract from Vol. 1 of Little Toller, Assemble and Common Ground’s ‘Common Treasures’ series, Megan Willoughby shares insights from her off-grid woodland community in Somerset.

It is 9 pm and I’m in bed. My cat, Benji, is curled into the backs of my knees to avoid the autumn wind, which cuts through the crumbling cob of my straw bale house. Firelight dances on the sheets pinned up to the ceiling to catch the dusty straw that falls from the roof panels, and I make out ten – no, thirty leggy spiders doing acrobatics on this stage. The big one must have had her babies! Outside, the southern coastal wind bellows through the Douglas firs that surround our houses, bending them like kelp as its song crescendos. My body seizes up, expecting a crack and a thud. Usually, they’re just falling branches, but sometimes, it’s the whole trunk.

At Tinker’s Bubble, we dwell beneath the trees, our minds and bodies battered, washed and warmed by wind, rain and sun. Life here has peeled back the layers I have accumulated over the years living in the engineered safety of a warm, convenient, fossil-fuel-enabled life. Sometimes, this has happened gently, and sometimes with the abrasiveness of paint stripper. From the cracking sound of a log split by wedges and a sledgehammer, to the smell of smoke that becomes ingrained in your hair, working the land without fossil fuels, using only hand tools and horses, has shown me a way of life pared back to a tangible human capacity; one which organically creates an enmeshed, sustainable existence.

It is springtime, and I wake abruptly to a small flock of geese flying overhead. I walk down the hill in bleary-eyed silence, scythe in hand. It’s hay cut day, and we each make our way to the hay meadow and join in the relay, each opening a new groove and proceeding in a staggered, swinging stomp. The dance becomes hypnotic as you let go and follow the scythe’s swing. Eventually, even your ankles flow. The rhythm is broken intermittently as someone stops to sharpen their blade with a stone or rescue a screaming frog from the march. The sweet swaff sound of each cut contrasts with the previous night’s tinkering and dinking of peening hammers, hitting scythe blades onto jigs for a sharp edge.

We have an unspoken rule that whoever is cooking for the community on hay-cutting days will bring down a snack at around 9 am, and sure enough, Greg appears with homemade doughnuts. The insides are raw but it doesn’t matter. We laugh and sit for a while, sipping strong tea in tannin-stained cups, eating the sweet, crispy edges with greasy fingers.

We finish the cut around 11 am, perfecting our swings for the final throes, and spread the grass out in the strengthening sun. I often think about the first hay cut I did at Tinker’s Bubble and how we basked in the sun together, tired and dazed, watching crickets jump about us, wondering whether they knew where they would land.

I finish the morning unscathed and buzzing like the stinking, sweating woods in the building heat. Cleaning a load of old fermenting bottles in the cider house that afternoon, I can feel this energy in every one. Life, like a starved dog, is gobbling up last year’s feast. A bottle explodes in my hand and a shard lodges itself into my wrist. Exhausted from the hay cut, I feel the end of my tether fray and snap, and start wailing for Richard to come up from the sawmill and help. He cleans and bandages my wound, and after lunch, we head back to the meadow to flip the grass. Grabbing our hay forks, we turn the spread again and again, working in staggered lines across the field, flipping up the green underbelly for the sun to crisp and silver.

After dinner, we will go back down to the meadow to rake up the hay into windrows for the night. The long ridges of hay, lying on the contours of the field, will cast wavelike shadows into the evening sun. For two more days we will repeat the same motions: raking out in the morning, flipping after lunch, and raking it back up again in the evening, before the dew sets in. When the hay is dry enough to be stored, the horses will pull it in a cart to the barn. This harvest allows us to sustain our animals, who sustain us, through another winter.

I left the meadow and began the last walk of the day, back up the hill, scythe in hand. As I passed through the terraced gardens and past the chicken coop, I noticed in the corner of my eye a cluster of deep fuchsia flowers on a wildly overgrown Japanese rose bush. Despite the plentiful Hogweed that surrounded the bush, I couldn’t resist the temptation to collect some of the sweet-smelling petals. As I slashed my way towards the rose bush with a scythe, part of me knew that the sandals and shorts I was wearing weren’t adequate protection from hogweed, but in my delirious hay day state of mind, it didn’t seem to matter.

Later that night, I felt different. The angry, red-rimmed blisters that had formed on my ankles and wrists wherever I had touched the hogweed were temporarily soothed by a poultice of cooling herbs. I don’t often hurt myself, so I understood this injury as a kind of warning. The woods are so alive, it can be hard not to meet their life force with a force of your own. I decided to take this as a reminder of my place.

Navigating early October mud wears down your knees, and I am stiff as I trudge down the hill. It’s 5:30 am, and it is abattoir day. A few of us gather around the cow shed and I go inside to let Primrose, our two-year-old heifer, out. We have plenty of time because, unlike our dairy cow, Daisy, Primrose is not headcollar-trained and has often run gleeful circles around us. We corral her gently down the bumpy track and, as she trots, we spread our arms to guide her, sometimes clapping to deter her from the wrong route. Getting her into the trailer takes an hour as we figure out how to get her out of a laurel bush she has somehow disappeared inside of. There is a brittleness to us, a desperate edge to our attempts to prevent her from sensing our stress. The veil of life feels thin as we drive through the cold mist to the local abattoir. We exchange a few words with one another, but it’s Primrose we listen for.

At Tinker’s Bubble, we do this once a year. We sell half of the cow to friends and family to cover costs and earn a little money. We keep the rest to feed the community through the winter and the hungry gap in early spring. We use every part of the carcass, turning the fat to tallow for cooking, making stock from the bones, feeding the lungs to the dog, and making tongue and tail pie. It’s a lot of work, emotionally and physically.

Over the years, I have developed a theory I’ve begun to call the ‘grief toll’. There is only so much grief each of us can bear to hold. When you’ve raised and loved an animal, their death takes its toll on you. Their meat tastes different, as flavours mingle with respect, grief and gratitude. There is a natural limit to the amount of meat we can consume before the grief toll becomes too high. If we don’t feel that toll, and respect its boundary, overconsumption takes a toll on our ecosystems instead. I do not believe that everyone should have to kill an animal if they want to eat it. We live within a spectrum of sensitivities and privileges. But to cultivate a relationship with the animals we eat, in some form, feels vital. We should feel the grief, and the gratitude.

Arriving at the abattoir, we reverse the trailer up to the gates, and two men come out. Primrose trots out into the pen, wide-eyed, overstimulated and curious. “We have Angus crosses at our place, too, they’re like big dogs, aren’t they!” says one of the men as he smiles at her. “Yes” I laugh through my tears. I feel the last image of her trotting through into the concrete killing room become imprinted on my being.

The following evening, I cook up half of Primrose’s extraordinarily large and glistening liver. The smoke from the pan fills the kitchen and mingles with the smells of woodsmoke and we gather around quietly to share memories of her life, giving thanks for the first of many meals made possible by Primrose’s death. I could not do what we do without moments like these.

Five months later, the cold of winter is starting to fade, and the mornings are sharp. I am the first to wake, and I am on tea duty. As I walk through the woods towards the kitchen, I gather loose sticks off the forest floor. Greg always said that Mike always said that nobody should ever walk up the hill empty-handed. I get some dried wood from the store, stack these sticks on the old newspaper we collect from the village on bin day, and light the outdoor fire pit with a match. Then, after filling the three blackened kettles and placing them on the grate over the fire, I start to saw and split Douglas fir logs to feed the flames.

Making tea is one of the very few moments when I am alone at Tinker’s Bubble. I sit on a roughly sawn bench by the growing fire and savour the rays of morning light that reach my face through the treetops. I take a deep breath, and remember that the trees are breathing too – I’m not alone after all. Slowly, the usual springtime cacophony starts to rise from the valley below. New lambs from Bagnell Farm bleat for their mothers. Horses neigh from field to field, and the birdsong chimes in every direction. Soon, people begin to appear, reaching for a cup of tea.

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Extracted from ‘Common Treasures Vol. 1: Land, food & farming’. A collaboration between Little Toller, architecture collective Assemble and the arts organisation Common Ground, ‘Common Treasures’ is a new series of books about the challenges faced by rural communities, written by people who are working on the ground and in the fields. Vols. 1 & 2 are out now and available in the Caught by the River Bandcamp shop.

Megan Willoughby is an ex-resident and shareholder of Tinker’s Bubble — an off-grid, woodland community that makes a living by working the land without fossil fuels. Megan is also an artist, working with natural and found materials to explore stories held individually and in communities around the cycles of life. Find her website here.