Hello!

So off we set off with the cat, two young children and another one about to arrive.  This was the beginning of One Cat Farm and our dream of leaving the city and returning to the place where we had grown up.

Ceredigion is a county in Wales which is relatively unknown and one of the poorest in Western Europe.  If we wanted to live in the sticks then we would need to make our own jobs.  And if in doing that we could encourage other people to come and enjoy this beautiful part of the world and contribute to the local economy then that would be amazing!

We also wanted a quieter, slower life with less stress and we naively thought that this would be the recipe.  How wrong we were.  Setting up a campsite, then running it and raising three young children whilst living in a house with a barely functioning bathroom, no internet and leaking walls was not quite as fun as we had planned it to be.  But we are both stubborn and proud people so couldn’t give up even if we wanted to and eventually, after an awful lot of hard work, it started to come together.  There is still a long way to go and our plans are always growing but we can now look back and enjoy what we have accomplished so far.  From pig farm to One Cat Farm!

Jessie

I was born in Essex but moved to Wales when I was 18 months old.  I grew up in a falling apart, old welsh farmhouse in a 500 hectare forest, 3 miles from any roads.  My two sisters and I had no tv and were basically feral.   My Dad is an Eco Warrior.  He is now retired but worked for Greenpeace for almost 40 years as a campaign coordinator. My mum was always ahead of the curve, raising us as vegetarians way before it was trendy and she has been vegan since I was 10, she has a very alternative outlook on life and some of this has been handed down to me. We had no money but I never felt poor, our childhood was one of total freedom and immersion in nature and I even though I hated being different as a child, I now know that this was a gift.

After school I studied interior architecture in Leeds, then worked for a while as an architectural assistant.  But Lyndon and I had itchy feet so we took off to explore the world.  Along the way we stayed in some really amazing and some really terrible accommodation.  We eventually ended up in London with our backpacks and nothing else, being both from humble beginnings we have had to work for everything that we have.  We shared a room in a house and saved all our money until eventually we were able to buy our own 2 bed flat in Hackney.  It was a squat and had had 18 people living in it.  My mum thought we were crazy.  But we worked away and did it up and then sold it and just after our first child was born bought another one.  Three more places followed, all of them brought back to life from squalor and so, after 10 years, we had the money to leave London and move on to the next chapter- One Cat Farm