Penrallt; "the wild card!"

Soo and Jon's journey from Whitechapel to West Wales 

Have you ever come back to work from a lovely weekend of being outdoors or back from your holidays and sat at your office desk on a Monday, coffee In-hand, emails demanding to be actioned immediately or the end of the world will be nigh?  

Those Monday morning blues spurred uplifted conversations to where else we could live and what else we could do with lives - Mexico, Spain, Wales, the Peak District… wouldn’t it be wonderful to have our own bit of land somewhere to open a campsite, perhaps an art studio, to have some animals and a garden?  Mainly, just to be outdoors?!

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After two years of talking about it, we wanted to know if we had it in us to seek out this life and ended up going on a camping recce adventure to West Wales, to check out six possible properties and Penrallt farm, the “wild card”.  

The last-minute wild card option came about when I went online that morning to check I had all the details for the 6 properties we'd shortlisted, and spotted a new listing.  It didn’t meet the brief, but it caught my eye!  

Our brief was somewhere with 6-10 acres of land, an established existing holiday business with which we could hit the ground running and no "Grand Designs" renovation project!

I remember us driving down the single-track lane from the main road, with green lush overhang of trees and an amazing view opening out before us.  As we pulled into the yard, we had both already started talking about it as if this was the place!  We walked around the site and the house and we could see there was a lot to take on.  Our families came to view and were aghast at the scale of the project, but also very excited for us. 

There was no established business on site.  The house needed some TLC, the barns were in urgent need of restoration and there was 27 acres of overgrown land to get to grips with!  But it had its own woodland, the views were absolutely stunning and in some fateful way Penrallt Farm had chosen us – we took on the life adventure to bring life back to this beautiful farm, and forge the next chapter in its 300-year history.