FRANCE
Year four at 'Cap
Eden'
In 2016 Philip Gray retired from his teaching post at Victoria College and with his wife, the artist Anna (Le Moine Gray), bought a dilapidated old farmhouse in a remote part of western Brittany. He has sent us an update on their life in what they call ‘Cap Eden’
‘D
emat‘ from Rural Brittany!
Four years ago we bought a tumble down farmhouse that had not been lived in for 30 years; covered in ivy and brambles; full of junk and rubbish; one part had a pine tree collapsed on the roof, another had so much water through the roof that the first floor had completely collapsed; three parts were designated as agricultural and there was no guarantee that we could live in them; the large hangar was collapsing and the roof was of a concrete/asbestos mix that would cost a fortune to remove.
64
What had we done? Well, four years on our home is almost finished but there is still much to do. Landscaping and general tidying up is needed to eradicate the building site feeling that still lingers. The last house made ready for use was the oldest; a small cottage that must have been the first human habitation before the 18th Century. It is now Anna’s studio. Perhaps we had our priorities askew and it should have been renovated first!
At long last Anna now has her own personal space and is so happy to be immersed again in her work. We are now looking after nearly 30 acres of wild rural land and often I feel as though we are on our own little island. We have the sea on one side of us, but on the other three sides you have to go some distance to find agricultural land that is ploughed, furrowed and chemically sanitised to produce crops of the ‘correct’ quality fields of all shades of artificial greens.
