The good life it ain't!
Meet the couple who retreated to their rural idyll because they were 'allergic' to modern life... and now live in a MUD HUT with no heat, running water or electricity (but they do have a postman)
Gentle birdsong outside your window. Vegetables from your own garden for dinner. Fresh water from a babbling brook. Who hasn't dreamed of a countryside life?
But there's The Good Life — and then there's Kate and Alan Burrows's life, which are two very different things.
For the couple, from the picturesque Tarka Valley, near Chulmleigh in North Devon, have spent the past 19 months living not just in the wilderness but in a hut they built themselves out of mud, straw and old tree trunks.
They have no running water, heat or electricity, and get all their power from oil burners, batteries and solar panels on their turf-covered roof.
In the rolling fields and bluebell woods that surround their property, they keep goats, geese and chickens — as dinner options, not pets — and their toilet is a cabin atop a compost heap.
The Burrows family have taken the idea of going back to nature rather more literally than most.
'It's wonderful having all this on your doorstep,' says Kate, grinning in the knee-deep mud that has mired their land after the recent rain. 'We're lucky to live naturally. It's going back to the way people lived in our grandparents' time, before technology and electrical appliances took over our homes.'
Yet, less than two years ago, Kate, 45, Alan, 47, and Kate's three grown-up sons from a previous relationship lived in a three-bedroom bricks-and-mortar house in Taunton, Somerset, complete with taps, sockets and all the trappings of modern family life.
Kate Burrows and her husband Alan
Then, in September 2015, they moved away from normal life — and into a mud hut in the woods. So what prompted such a dramatic change of lifestyle?
The back-to-basics existence has always appealed to Kate, an artist and part-time carer, and Alan, a former photocopier engineer who now farms the land around the hut and looks after the couple's animals.
Both wear the sort of tie-dyed clothes that befit teenagers on a gap year; Kate has red, dreadlocked hair and Alan sports a scraggly beard, mothballed jumper and mismatched socks. These days, they admit, they wash just once a week.
'It might not be to everyone's taste, but it works for us,' says Alan. 'We take pleasure in simple things: the sun shining in the morning, good company and good conversation. Deep down we're like any other middle-aged couple. We listen to the Archers and go to bed at 8pm. We just happen to live in a hut made of mud.'
Helpfully, Kate's youngest son, now 18, had just left home to go to college when they came up with their madcap plan, so he wasn't forced to up sticks, too.
But there is a more curious reason behind the Burrows's decision to retreat into the woods. Kate suffers from a condition known as 'multiple chemical sensitivity', a little-understood disorder said to affect several thousand people in the UK. Sufferers claim chemicals in everyday products — from shampoo to washing powder — and electromagnetic fields from televisions or even wifi give them severe, allergic-type reactions.
Doctors are sceptical about the condition's causes, with many saying it is a reaction to stress rather than physical triggers. Kate disagrees. 'I was bed-bound before we lived here,' she insists. 'Doctors said it might be fibromyalgia — a condition characterised by widespread chronic pain.
Mrs Burrows said: 'Living in a modern home was like having flu all the time'
'I did research, and this seemed more likely. It made sense to try a different way of life.'
Today, she and Alan shun most of what an average person would call life's essentials. They have plant-based alternatives to washing powder, soap and shampoo and own just one appliance — a rust-encrusted gas stove. They get their drinking water from a spring across the field, which they filter with a Heath-Robinson contraption made from an upturned tea urn.
Miraculously, Kate's condition doesn't seem to be affected by her mobile, which she charges at work (she cares for a disabled woman who lives nearby) and uses to keep in touch with the outside world.
Though they don't have a television, the couple aren't averse to watching Netflix on the phone — a fitting symbol of their bizarre hybrid life. There is no wifi, but 3G signal — fortuitously strong here — is apparently harmless.
This week, the phone's been ringing off the hook as friends and neighbours call to congratulate Kate and Alan on their new-found fame, with news of their home spreading as far as Vietnam.
'They're calling me 'Mud Hut Woman', which I'm taking as a compliment,' she laughs. 'It's not like we're living in the Neolithic age! Neither of us wears a loincloth. We drive a car and shop at Sainsbury's and listen to the radio just like anyone else.
The living room of the couple's mud hut home which they have decorated themselves
'But the more people are talking about us, the better. We need all the support we can get.'
This is because Kate and Alan are facing eviction. Despite it being their land, the woods and surrounding countryside in which their shack stands have been designated an 'area of high landscape value', which means that there are very strict guidelines for the type of properties allowed.
As the couple only sought planning permission retrospectively, North Devon Council has declared the hut doesn't fit regulations, and must be pulled down. They have until December to fight the decision — or find somewhere else to live.
'We've put a lot of time and energy into building our home, and now they want to tear it down. We're devastated,' says Kate.
Whatever you think of the couple's motivations, there's something undeniably appealing about setting up home in a Hobbit-like hut miles from civilisation.
The sun is streaming through the trees and a cock is crowing as I pull down the remote track leading to 'Riverside Meadows'.
Unexpectedly, when I first arrive I bump into the postman — even a hut, it turns out, has its own postcode — though he doesn't look best pleased to trudge through the mud.
The couple have no running water, heat or electricity, and get all their power from oil burners, batteries and solar panels on their turf-covered roof
Through a rickety gate and up a steep set of steps is a small oval-shaped structure which, from the outside, looks like something out of a fairy tale.
Inside, I slip off my wellies — Kate is a stickler for keeping the scraps of rug and carpet on the floor clean — and squint through the gloom.
On the left is a wooden door leading to the bedroom, where the couple sleep in a four-poster bed Alan made from chestnut trees. Straight ahead is the living room, filled with mismatched second-hand armchairs, an old coffee table and a huge wood burner, with a chimney to the roof, where they heat water, dry clothes and cook much of their food.
Everything they need is in this room: a bathroom area to the right (the loo — a hole in the ground into which they tip sawdust — is out the back door), the kitchen straight ahead and even a dining area and conservatory with decking.
The first thing that strikes you is the silence. There's no TV, no cars, no noisy neighbours; just blissful quiet. The second thing is the overwhelming smell of earth; a grubby, muddy stench that seeps into my hair and clings to my clothes for hours after I leave.
'The walls are made of straw bales, which we cover in cob — a mud mix — and then lime, to make them strong and durable,' Kate explains.
'It insulates the house in winter and keeps it cool in summer. When it gets especially cold, we keep the fire on all day: because it's circular in shape, the whole house is heated.
'There is a bit of a smell and it is a bit messy. I've never been much of a one for housework, I'm afraid. But we keep it as neat and tidy as we can.'
It took just six weeks, with the help of several friends and rudimentary structural plans they found — ironically — on the internet, to build the hut.
Kate Burrows and partner Alan before marriage
Kate had owned the 21-acre site for ten years, using money from a divorce settlement — she was married before meeting Alan a decade ago — to buy it, but previously it had only been used for camping trips and barbeques.
Neither Kate nor Alan has any building experience (or indeed any farming experience), but along the way they've found clever ways to turn their hut into a home.
A skylight built into the roof, for example, is made from an old car windscreen, and the 'windows' in the dining area are old conservatory doors.
Around the walls they've hung family photographs and there are homely, multicoloured cushions dotted about to perk up the shabby surroundings.
The whole thing cost just £2,000 to build with natural materials and odds and ends bartered and borrowed from friends. Today, they estimate their weekly outgoings are around £75 — far less than a family in a normal house would spend on bills.
'Living like this automatically makes you frugal,' says Kate. 'When you've carried water all the way across a field and up those steps, you don't want to waste a drop. We can't leave taps running because we have none. We can only listen to the radio when the batteries are charged. You don't take anything for granted.'
Having devoted so much of the past year to their planning fight, Kate and Alan haven't yet become self-sufficient in their meals.
But lack of refrigeration means they eat mostly vegetables anyway, and Kate's kitchen garden includes artichokes, beetroot, spinach — and even tea.
Next week, they plan to start milking the goats to make their own milk and cheese. Once they've established a proper smallholding, they hope to invite schools and local community groups on to their land to enjoy it.
It's a relentless way of life, but a rewarding one: since moving into the hut, Kate insists her symptoms have all but disappeared.
'The effect was almost immediate. I didn't feel sick all the time; I was able to get out of the house and get myself a job. This has given me a new lease of life.'
Mud huts aren't for everyone, of course. Sometimes even Kate and Alan miss 21st-century conveniences and there were more than a few raised eyebrows among friends and family about their new home.
'They thought we were bonkers to begin with,' smiles Kate. 'Most of them have come round. We even get visitors these days; people love coming over for a nosy.'
Kate and Alan are planning to erect an electric fence around their home as soon as they can afford to
There's also the matter of security. It's hard to fit bolts or burglar alarms in a hut, and though Kate and Alan have little of value, they're planning to erect an electric fence around their home as soon as they can afford to.
It's primarily to keep animals out, but it should do a good job of deterring planning officers, too. For now, this remains their biggest battle.
Despite several appeals, North Devon Council has refused to back down. Planning service representative Graham Townsend admits the Burrows's situation is 'unfortunate', but adds: 'It is clearly not in the public interest to have houses springing up across the countryside without permission.'
He may have a point, but Kate and Alan feel their hut has never been properly assessed. It's on their land, can't be seen from the road and has the support of every local I speak to.
'We can't understand what the problem is,' says Kate. 'When supermarkets and apartment blocks are springing up all over the place, it's crazy that they won't give us permission to live as we do. We're not doing anyone any harm. We just want to live quietly in our little hut in the woods.'
Whatever you may think of their strange way of life, it's hard not to agree. An Englishman's home — or hut — is his castle, after all.
(The Mail, Uk)
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