When we arrived to West Kestle, sometime around midmorning on the 28th November 2016, we had no idea of what kind of lifestyle we had signed for. This “move to the country” was full of bumps that we would discover along the journey.
We moved from a busy working week’s schedule in a busy city, with very tight timetables and agendas… All of the sudden, there was no sounds of anything at night. Which made it all fell very strange. It took me a couple of years to get used to this feeling on emptiness in this somewhere in the universe, where there were actually so many quiet thigs around I had not yet started to notice.
The vegetation did not stop growing in winter. Some of the fields were already halved from the lack of keeping from previous owners. What also grew very well, and we did not realised at the start, as it was half buried in the ground, was the amount of plastic hiding beneath the surface. Someone took this land as a litter wonderland for their own and take some random business that considered it was alright to cover non-biodegradable disposal with a thin layer of soil. So the first two years I did not think of using the land, all I could think of was picking bits of plastic every time I went for a little walk. The place was beautiful, the location was brilliant… I was let down by all the manufactured human residue I thought I was moving away from!!
And it was all this picking and unearthing, collecting and removing, cleaning this overpriced plot of land: it was all the healing of my little piece of Earth, as if I had chosen to nurse the wound of a hurt being of the woods: it was all this care I put onto West Kestle that made me connect and fall in love with my little farm. So much weeding plastic, that I even knew the stones in each inch of the ground. I learnt all this new looking herbs and plants, some I had never seen before in my life. Some were otherwise very familiar, from that time back in my Mother Land when I used to have time to look and perceive there was actually a whole world alive all around me. And, thanks god -big sigh of relive-, the world of Life was still here after so long!!
Kestle Alpacas 