'Although a male, Pepper was bottle-fed as a kid and is pretty docile'

Stephan Price didn’t keep animals while living near Bristol, but since his move to Vimoutiers, France, in 2017, a chèvre des fossés goat has worked its way into his affections and has proved an effective vegetation-clearing machine

- Stephan Price

Stephan Price and Isobel Tomlinson once lived in the Whitehall/St George area of Bristol where they worked in academia and for environmental organisations, Stephan as a researcher at the University of Exeter and Isobel as a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. But the time came to “walk the walk”, as Stephan describes it, meaning leaving city life behind and following the Good Life. But instead of looking for a property within the West Country, or even in Wales, or possibly the Lake District, the couple took out a map and studied France for a suitable spot.

At the beginning of 2017, the couple packed up all their belongings — their entire life, in fact — and headed to the hamlet of Le Pont de Vie (which means bridge of life), sited near Vimoutiers, a small town in the ‘county’ of Orne (Orne stretches from the Pays d’Auge in the east, where Stephan and Isobel are located, to the granitic Suisse Normande in the west, with its broad arable plain and a forest in between). Vimoutiers is on the river Vie, and living there makes you a ‘Vimonasterien’, or a Monasterian of Life.

“We were looking for beauty, location and that mix of past and future potential,” says Stephan. “We wanted to be within cycling distance of a town, and to have reasonably easy access back to family in the UK. The buildings are ‘colombage’, wood frame and clay that is characteristic of the area. Also, they had not been messed about with too much.