Nodal community in the UK

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#1

Here in the UK it is hard to find affordable land which could facilitate the feral culture nodal ideas without worrying about planning permission from local government.legally you can only camp or live in caravans or motor homes on your own land that is not registered as residential (with an existing dwelling or planning permission for building something residential) for a maximum of 28 days per year. There are strict laws on use of common land and squatting land temporarily has been done historically​ by travellers (new age and Irish) for a long time and has increasingly been suppressed by the government changing the law slowly making it ever more hard.there are laws in place to supposedly help nomadic people (travellers and gypsies) to find suitable places to be sites, but this in practice is not very successful or in line with FC’s ideas.

Currently there are ways around this which could facilitate something closer to the FC nodal community vision.

you can become “seasonal workers” who are on the land for the purpose of agriculture or forestry, these have there limitations though with the definition of caravan and if family’s would be entitled to reside on the land and if your “business” was recognised as viable and justifiable to the size of the group and their income. Another avenue is permitted development on agricultural land or woodland which is 5hectres or more in which you can station your “workers” to construct a agricultural or forestry building within dimensions specified in planning law.this also would have similar limitations to the previous avenue. Then there are organisation which can apply for exemption certificates​ for camping and caravaning, which allows its members to stay on land for 42 consecutive days and 60 days in total per year. The organisation must promote recreation and leisure, be constituted​ and members must follow a code of conduct.

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#2

Would you be willing to go outside the U.K? I live in Ireland and land here is expensive too. I’m definitely more interested in buying land in somewhere like Portugal where prices are cheaper but I don’t even have the funds for that yet.

Most places I’ve looked at don’t go under 5k/acre but maybe there are roundabout ways you can get land cheaper or at least that’s what I’m hoping.

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#3

i have thought of moving many times to southern Europe, i would have to apply for residency and be a foreign person in a new habitat, learning a new culture and language, which i feel would put me back on my rewilding trajectory. I have a feeling its important to represent a social shift for the northern Europeans and work on restoring a lifeway here for future generations, and this is my home and i have family here. i hear Ireland isnt he as expensive as the England and Wales or Scotland have large areas of land for reasonable prices if you willing to do some restoration.

Its nice to discuss with someone from nearby.

#4

I guess maybe it’s easier for me to be willing to move because I haven’t started a family yet. I think I would enjoy learning a new language and culture plus after even a few months you can become pretty decent at speaking a language when you’re immersed in it 24/7. At the end of the day though I am pretty much willing to try projects like these wherever it’s easiest/cheapest. We don’t really have the option of being picky. Not sure Ireland is a great option though, almost all the land for sale is farmland which would take years and years to make into anything that could resemble native, wild land.

I suppose I should be investing in these projects for the long run but it’s easy to get impatient.

Also what do you mean by representing a social shift for Northern Europeans?

#5

I wonder how many people on here are European. If there is enough it may be wise to work together on getting a node in a country we all agree on. Obviously money would be a sensitive topic in this case as pooling funds together is very difficult to do in a fair way. It’s also easy for me to say because I don’t have the funds to buy my own node at this point and it will be a couple years I would imagine until I do.

Is it possible to make poll based topics on the forum where people can vote to say they’re european etc.?

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#6

Hey, I’m Scottish but currently in Estonia. Is this specifically English law you are talking about? Because it sounds a lot more restrictive than Scottish law - you can basically camp anywhere without permission (except the eastern shores of Loch Lomond in summer months because neds/chavs always leave litter and other people’s gardens, but it’s fine if you ask, and currently used crop land, but you can go to the boundaries) and set a fire as long as it isn’t in sight of a road.

And yes, land is too expensive in the UK, unless you can buy forest land in Scotland in bulk for a few hundred pounds per acre, but we’re talking costs of upwards of half a million so it’s not feasible. There is an option to rent fields for nominally for horses, which is usually super cheap. The restriction is contractually you would have to vacate the land a minimum of 1 day per year otherwise it cannot be rented as grazing land (presumably to allow it to recover…). I doubt that would be a problem though.

The note about travellers is correct - they still even have to pay rent to the local council if they can even find a spot to live legally, which are few and far between. I’m not sure there are even Highland Travellers anymore.

Another problem is hunting and gun regulations in the UK are quite prohibitive, for instance having to have a secured gun locker bolted to a brick wall. How can we have that if we are nomads? And not being allowed to cross other people’s land with a firearm - how do we move between nodes? So getting calories from the land isn’t such an easy task in the UK. Sea fishing and shore foraging for personal use is not prohibited in any way that I know of. River and lake fishing often needs a permit for the specific waterway in Scotland, which is super annoying, although some are permit-free. So an idea I had a while ago would be do nomadic sea kayaking between the western islands, Argyll and the western highlands. Many of the islands are uninhabited and the highlands are sparsely populated, some islands have feral sheep/goat populations and no law enforcement so no one would ever know if one went missing.

Problems with this style - holy shit have you ever been to the western islands of Scotland? There is nothing but the Atlantic between them and North America. It is so stormy and wet. Not so cold, it barely snows or freezes anymore. And climate predictions say it will only get wetter and stormier. The weather can change in the snap of your fingers, you think it is bad on the mainland? It can be 26C and a clear sky then nearly a hurricane with pissing rain in 30 minutes. On Tiree, the sunniest place in the UK, plants grow to the north east because of the wind. We’d need to keep our storm clothes on or close by otherwise it can get tricky. But we’d have no need for buying land or dealing with permits or the law so it has its ups and downs.

#7

Interesting but the sheep and goat populations would probably not be a sustainable source of food for more than a couple people, or is there a huge amount of them? Kayaking has never been my idea of a feral lifestyle, unless the boats were made by the person using them but at the same time we all gotta start somewhere and it is a skill that takes generations to master I presume.

I wouldn’t be mad on the climate up there either.

#8

I would be very interested in setting up some sort of node in the UK. I’m currently engaged in trying to work out how to re-wild land in the UK back to the Holocene flora and fauna (obviously wolves and bears etc are a no go sadly). Removing Japanese knotweed, budleja and Him.balsam, reintroducing pine martens to hunt grey squirrels to allow hazlenuts to flourish again and hunting deer would be a good start. Land is very difficult to acquire and live on in the UK unless you have a ton of money, the planning permission is a nightmare for more back-to-the-land types. You can forage in most places without people noticing but making it sufficient seems unlikely in the short term without some sort of hybrid forest-garden set up, which I’m not averse to.

#9

hi, wolf andy. i am in the process of setting up an organisation which can apply for a camping exemtion certifiacate in the uk. me and my partner are hoping to organise some gatherings this summer and october, with foraging as a theme to start things off. if you would be interested in meeting you can email me at [email protected].

we are hoping to form the organisation formally by the end of the year and look for nodes to buy in the meantime. we want to get a few near the coast in south devon to be based over summer and find a woodland to manage as a workers coop for 6 months of the year over winter, around the border between wales and england.