The Magic Roundhouse

Another thing which ha been taking up quite a lot of time for me recently but has again been great fun, has been helping to work on the Roundhouse at Dyfed Permaculture Farm.

Some years ago we were given an old yurt to provide another meeting space – somewhere smaller, more intimate, tidier and quieter than the Barn. For a couple of years it worked well although we knew that the timber was not in great condition and the canvas had been mended. Then one Autumn, just a few days before we were going to take it down for winter, a gale blew and when we looked the yurt had a very distinct lean to it! A couple who love the Farm and visit regularly but live in England offered us some money to build something that would be useful and enhance the facilities. We decided to build a Roundhouse to the same footprint as the yurt in the same spot. As far as possible we would use materials we had on the land (timber from managing the woodland, soil, straw and hay) parts of the old yurt, and reclaimed materials which we could collect.

Over the summer of 2019, with the help of a local man. Richard Sylvan, who has built many roundhouses, we got the circle of posts up and the roof on all using timber felled on site. Some of the work was done by our regular volunteers but we also advertised it as a course with people paying a modest fee to come and learn. The roof is a ‘reciprocating’ one – the radial rafter poles were laid in a spiral on top of an upright which was then knocked away – each rafter holds its neighbour up! it gives us the whole span without pillars. Very clever! The rafters were covered with the canvas from the old yurt roof, then a heavy duty pond liner (we had to buy that!), some gravel and then on the top turf which we scraped off the car park thereby doing two jobs in one. Over that winter 2019/20 even just having a space to shelter under was very useful. But building work stopped until Spring.

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Raising the roof – a hard hat job!

Then Covid struck. For a while only the 2 households who live on the farm could do any work there. Then in the summer, as restrictions eased a little our small group of regular volunteers began to have occasional workdays and we spent one of them doing some minor repairs to the yurt floor. We managed to hold a couple of management committee meetings in the shelter of the roof which kept the rain off but not the wind so we were essentially out of doors but not getting wet!

Repairing the floor pieces

This year, once things began to ease again we decided to make a push to get on with it. It wasn’t possible to run courses but having ascertained which of the regulars could make each date we were able to invite a couple of people who had been on the original courses, and lived locally, to come as volunteers for the wall building. The walls are lengths of cordwood from trees felled on the Farm land interspersed with bottle bricks (an empty wine bottle and a jam jar taped together) and all held together with cob which is a mixture of soil, clay and straw. We obtained permission to dig clay from an old pit a few miles away, Richard came back to show us how to do all this. The windows are all ‘found’ ones – donations of replaced windows or ‘wrong size’ panes. There is still a small section of wall to fill in once the fire has been installed and the flue put through the wall and there are a few other odd gaps to be filled in when we have another batch of cob made.

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Mixing cob!

Then we spent a long day putting the floor down. It was originally the gymnasium floor in a girls school and still has the markings for netball! It was salvaged and cut up to become the floor of the yurt and is now laid in the Roundhouse. The hole in the middle is the original space for a stove and will be filled with a mosaic – that will be the finishing touch!

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The original intention was to put doors on the three remaining sections but in the light of the pandemic we have decided that for now we will hang big curtains across there. That will encourage us and any other users to keep it very well ventilated. We had a meeting in there on Monday night and it was a magical space.

To read more about Dyfed Permaculture Farm and see more pictures go to http://www.dyfedpermaculturefarmtrust.org.uk or to their Facebook page