There is a particular image people carry of places like Glenshellish.
Mist over hills; Moss on stone; Chickens wandering through long grass; Communal dinners under soft light; A life that looks intentional and whole.
Some of that (if not all of it, to be fair) is absolutely real. But not in the way that Social Media would have you believe. This blog sits in the gap between the dream of a place and the human reality of living in it.
Glenshellish is, in many ways, a dream to live in. The air is so clean it healed my asthma. Everything is shades of green and water and bursting life. I love this place so much i want to bathe in its soil like some mystical Pagan ritual. during the pitch black winter nights you can see the Milky Way arch over the historical steading. But living here is not aesthetic. It is muddy, full of midges, wet, logistical, communal, solitary, occasionally exhausting.
I am not interested in smoothing that tension away. In a former life I was an social anthropologist, specialising in how humans communicate meaning through images. And I suppose you can take the academic out of the University but an anthropological lens, a desire to understand how living together shapes meaning, never leaves you. I cannot live somewhere without noticing what stories are being told about it, what rituals are forming, what symbols are emerging, and what is edited out. So this blog is part documentation and part inquiry.
It is not a farm manual. I very much do not have the expertise for that. It is not a lifestyle brand. I have even less expertise for that. It is not a finished vision. Glenshellish is still becoming what it will be, and we are still learning how to live here well.
Some posts will be reflective, where I try to articulate what communal living in cycles has shown me about food, play, work and belonging. Some will be raw, written in the middle of exhaustion or after something has gone wrong. Some will be poetic, because occasionally the only honest response to this landscape is poetry. And some will simply be photographs, because sometimes images carry meaning more precisely than words.
Photography, for me, is not decoration. It is a way of paying attention.
There will be posts about drains and fencing and animal housing. There will be posts about death. There will be posts about dinner. There will be posts about games in the courtyard and about the strange intimacy of building something alongside people who arrived as strangers a few weeks earlier.
One of the clearest things WWOOFing has shown us is that Glenshellish is not meant to be lived in alone. In some form, it needs to hold shared life. Not necessarily permanent communal living, but intentional, recurring cycles of it. People arriving, working, cooking, playing, leaving. Responsibility shared rather than outsourced. Daily life structured collectively rather than individually. That is not a romantic idea. It is something we have already tested in small ways, and it has altered how we imagine the future of this place.
I am interested in what holds people together when they are not bound by family or long-term obligation. I am interested in how food structures belonging, how shared practical work reshapes relationships, how immersion in nature recalibrates people who are used to constant noise, and how play allows strangers to soften into collaboration.
These are not abstract questions here. They are daily realities.
Rural life is easily romanticised. The internet is full of soft-focus versions of “simple living” that omit the stress, the finances, the interpersonal friction, the maintenance. I have no desire to present Glenshellish as a polished escape.
This blog will move between tones because life here moves between tones. Clearing a waterway by hand does not feel the same as playing D&D around a table. Burying an animal does not feel the same as building benches for a fire pit.
Consistency here will not be about mood. It will be about attention.
If there is a thread running through all of it, it is this: I am trying to understand what it means to live well in a specific place, with other people, at a time that often feels fragmented.
Glenshellish is not an escape from the world. It is a place within it. Weather disrupts plans. Projects stall. People get tired. Animals die. Midges arrive.
And still, something is taking shape. Not a finished vision. More like a practice.
