Debbie Kingsley talks to smallholder Becci Helm about her sheep choice
Becci Helm, her husband James, and children Jacob,13,and Katie Bea, 12, live on a 14-acre smallholding in Shropshire together with two dogs, a cat, three goats, four pigs, 20 chickens and 90 Shetland Sheep.
“I guess I’m what you’d call a genuine ‘accidental smallholder’,” said Becci. ‘I came to Shropshire 20 years ago when I met my husband James, Shropshire born and bred. We spent the next 14 years buying wrecks of houses, doing them up and moving on.
“Our goal was to have a forever home with no close neighbours, nowhere near a busy road, with a bit of land. We found Gilberry Grove in 2014 and fell in love with its location in the heart of the Shropshire Hills AONB. It was everything we wanted (apart from the house needing more work than I would have liked) and it came with 14 acres of pastureland, divided into five fields. The house is bang in the middle of the land with one good and two rather dodgy barns. We hadn’t been looking for quite so much land, but now we had it we had to do something about it.
“The land was being used by a neighbouring farmer to graze his sheep. Having spent so long looking for our quiet country idyll, we didn’t want other people to be coming and going around us; we’d have to get our own sheep.
Choosing Shetlands
This story is from the December 2017 edition of Country Smallholding.
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This story is from the December 2017 edition of Country Smallholding.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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