RURAL LIFE
Tired of the town, Hattie Kerrs packed her bags and moved into a showman’s wagon to live off-grid. Henrietta Holder meets her on her Derbyshire smallholding
I love autumn: preparing for winter, the gathering in, the mountains of squash and the strings of onions,” says Hattie Kerrs from her smallholding in Derbyshire. One of Hattie’s favourite books as a child was the autobiographical Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, about the author’s pioneer family and life on the American frontier in the late 1800s. “All those descriptions of the winter pantries were magical,” she says. Her own life now shares many similarities with her childhood role model: Hattie lives in a 1930s showman’s wagon and is completely off-grid.
Today, a kettle hums on the wood-fired range and a spinning wheel sits in one corner. Hattie shares the six-and-a-half acres of land with her partner, Jonny Browne, who bought it in 2019. They have spent the intervening years sowing and growing, harvesting and storing. Instead of machines, they use a horse. All that’s missing is a bear in the woods.
A wide ribbon of trees tops the sweep of hillside on Hattie and Jonny’s smallholding, Horse and Harvest Homestead. Winter leaves – red mustard and mizuna, kale and cavalo nero – thrive alongside fat bulbs of Florence fennel in the warmth of a small polytunnel. There’s a small flower garden, and a chicken run for the pair’s Welsummers and Cream Legbars, who offer up eggs in chestnut browns and pale blues. Hattie and Jonny also look after Hebridean and Shetland sheep. Bertie, a grey ram and Hattie’s favourite, keeps the others in order. Their fleeces provide wool for Hattie to spin and knit, but other lambs make their way to the table. Hattie finds it difficult to say goodbye to an animal she has cared for, but feels reassured that it has had a good life. “Welfare is top priority,” she says.
RURAL ROOTS
Hattie has the perfect CV for living off the land. She grew up in Cumbria, where her family kept pigs, chickens and ducks, and has grown produce ever since – first in an allotment at university and then in a market garden she tended with friends. She has always loved making things, too, doing a degree in fine art and a postgraduate research masters in anthropological craft. Having taught herself how to spin so that she could use her own wool, she sells her knitwear online and has developed knitting patterns for people to make their own. When she can, she teaches face-to-face workshops and is planning to run short online courses next year in spinning wool, growing, processing and
