As someone who has only ever lived in a European city, this is very hard to imagine :)
Do you have any ballpark figures as in how remote those watermills are? Like.. next road is 10km? 50km? Are there even roads to your property?
Do you have any ballpark figures as in how remote those watermills are? Like.. next road is 10km? 50km? Are there even roads to your property?
The nearest paved road is about 5km by track from the mill - the bottom km was impassible when we found the place, but nothing a day with a bulldozer and a chainsaw couldn’t fix - it looked like about 60 years of growth. The track down the valley is steep and winding, and looks like it goes nowhere. Despite being at the bottom of a deep, steep valley, we get an almost full day of light, as the mill is on the north bank of a large inverted U bend in the river - the sun rises over the valley to our left, grazes the hills to the south, and sets over the valley to the right. Someone in the 1300s really thought about where to put the structure, as 50m either way along the bank gets shaded way more.
Right now we’re having to walk in and out, as we had prodigious rain in December, which both highlighted our flood risk (overtopped the roof!) and made a steep, poorly drained section of the road collapse - I’ve spent the past week teaching myself how to make a pitched stone road - nice Neolithic technique, and means all the materials I need are within spitting distance of the road - rock, gravel.
The next mill, which is about 1.5km downstream of us, has no road or track, just a steep path.
I am still scratching my head over how they built them - the lower courses of stones in the walls must weigh five tonnes apiece - huge boulders, moved purely with human and animal power. After seeing the river go crazy last month, I understand why - the force was sufficient to uproot large trees, to wash away the car, to completely scout the earth to bare rock - but the mill couldn’t have cared less. It’s good timing, insofar as we hadn’t done too much work yet, and now we know we need to ensure everything structural in there can deal with immersion, and everything else needs to be portable. Constraint, sure, but an interesting one.
While shovelling muck there yesterday (temporarily renting a house after being flooded out) I heard a loud plop over the roar of the weir - and saw two otters hunting crayfish in the mill pond - I could see them flipping rocks on the bottom and grabbing them, as the flood has washed away sediments and organics, leaving the water crystal clear. This is the stuff that makes me persevere!
It has been an intense few months, just getting the place habitable - and when winter arrived life turned into a cycle of gathering firewood and plugging holes in masonry with rags - and then the whole place flooded in December, so the last six weeks have been muck-shovelling, hosing, repairing and reclaiming chattels which got flooded - we moved everything up to a shed with its floor level 5m vertically above the mill’s floor, which is 4m above the normal river level - still flooded - almost a 10m surge! Thankfully, it was only 75cm deep in there, and stopped 5cm short of trashing the solar batteries, inverter, etc., but got all the power tools and electronics (pcs, tv, NAS, routers, etc.) - which miraculously all still work after a wash and dry, barring CMOS batteries. Worst flood in centuries, apparently. We waded out in the darkness, in torrential rain, in thigh deep swirling muddy water, as the river had already burst its bank onto our track, the cats screaming bloody murder in their bag, and walked the 5km up to the car that I’d had the foresight to park up by the paved road... had nightmares for weeks - not something I care to ever repeat. Good we did evac, even if late, or we’d have probably ended up hypothermic and/or drowned.
Anyway. Ultimately, we want to use technology and automation to live off grid without reverting to medieval peasants - and the last four months have underscored that necessity, as I don’t think I can sustain this level of physical activity indefinitely. Today, after my conference calls, I’m heading back down there to keep on rebuilding the road, in the bloody freezing rain - but I have to get it done, as it’s about to be a blocker on getting anything else done. I comfort myself with the probable lie that I’ll be lying in a hammock listening to the birds and the river in a few months, and this will all be a distant memory!
The pros definitely outweigh the cons. We’ve met one other guy in this area who is doing the whole off grid thing - and he’s been doing it for years, and it’s still an incessant struggle - from components of his solar system failing (Chinese crud. Sorted him out with victron gear), to a donkey getting in and eating his crops, to his water ending up poisonous (Christmas vomit buddies), to his road also washing away - but he also wouldn’t trade it for the world - it’s the feeling of freedom and agency that is the attraction - nobody is doing these things to you - either it’s your own mistake, from which to learn, or just nature being a harsh mistress. Also, it’s really goddamned nice to just walk out of the front door in the morning, straight into wilderness. I start each day at home sitting on a rock with a coffee, just observing. Even with the stressors, I’m happier than I ever was behind a desk.