On Saturday the 23rd
of August I visited Runnymede Eco Village, which lies in woodland at
Cooper's Hill, a fifteen minute walk from Egham town centre,
overlooking beautiful Surrey countryside. The weekend had been set
aside for a two, then a three-day, free festival, which according to
the promotional flyer posted on the website would include workshops
on circus skills like juggling, spoon carving, a wild food walk,
educational talks on the law of the land, an acoustic stage and a
woodland cafe.
A stile leading to the National Trust Park
I was glad to escape
the noise of the dual carriageway for a pleasant walk along the
woodland path which leads into the woodland of Cooper's Hill Coppice,
which sits next to the National Trust owned Runnymede Park. At this
time of the year the sides of the path are alive with blackberries,
most of which were fully ripe, and other creatures like rabbits and
squirrels. Along the way you pass the fields filled with cows and
occasional groups of cyclists and dog walkers.
When I eventually
came to the 16th century-style longhouse where meals are prepared I
found a group of people sitting around the fire, one guy playing an
acoustic bass guitar. It was about mid-day so I asked if the wild
food foraging workshop had happened yet.
“Bit early for
that yet!” was the response I received, which told me instantly
that I should stop and re-adjust my body clock to hippie-time. A
conversation with one of the stalwarts of the village, who took
umbridge with my use of the word “work” led me to drop this
completely from our conversation. “Will you be doing any
playshops?” I asked. No, but later he might go up to the temple
near the top of the hill and rant. He was a “ranter”. The Ranters
were a radical grassroots movement that existed in medieval England
around the same time as the historical Diggers, the movement which
inspired the creation of this Eco Village at Runnymede two years ago.
To date the Runnymede Eco Village has been in existence for twice as
long as the Diggers that occupied wasteland on St George's Hill in
1649.
The path leading to the Temple
There was
interesting conversation around the fire about similar communities to
this one, both in history and in our own time, and I met many people
from different countries, as well as a few familiar faces who have
been involved in radical eco communities for years.
In summer the number
of residents grows to somewhere between twenty and thirty people, but
in winter when the ground becomes increasingly muddy and the weather
colder and wetter, this number shrinks to a core group of about five
or six committed individuals who treasure the experience of living
“outside the matrix” in a life more connected to nature.
A yurt in the Rainbow section of Runnymede Eco Village
The perception of
time which I touched on earlier is key to this kind of life. The
price we pay for the convenience of modern industrial society, where
it takes a second to turn on the light, is that we become reliant on
energy companies, and the jobs we need to pay their bills. When it
takes half an hour to “turn on the light”, as one villager put
it, this puts you in an entirely different frame of mind with regards
to time, but it makes us more aware and more responsible of the
process it takes to get that light – from collecting wood, to
getting it lit properly, all of which can take up to half an hour –
because we are intimately involved in every step of the process.
Woodcraft folk-art by a community member named Lucas
Spending time at a
place like Runnymede Eco Village is about reconnecting ourselves to
the reality of a life lived close to nature, and not by the
unsustainable rhythms of cities or market economics.
