This has been brewing for months: a new renewables installation at Roundhill Barn that opens the way to zero-emissions events and extends a warm welcome to every season.
Designed and installed by BEE of Trowbridge, the project uses photo-voltaic thermal panels designed and made by Abora in Zaragoza.
The beautiful, discreet installation provides electricity and hot water from innovative hybrid photo-voltaic thermal (sic – PVT) panels invented and made by Abora in Zaragoza. Batteries and a hot water store provide 240v power and hot water into an underfloor heating system.
Book your event now, because we will review prices shortly.
We’re just finalising the connections to the barn and borehole, but today we had the satisfaction of our first-ever solar powered mow.
Corrugated iron Autumn fields. Flat brown doors of earth open south.
A tattered cloak of crows pulls fast for the woods to bury evensong. I mime along to their twilight choir (but know the words are wrong)
The soft smell of damp light fading on green water in the steel trough, safe against the hawthorn hedge holding the last shape of landscape stolen.
I am drawn back there from this shore. Back to the woods, hedge and trough. Just four more fields, through that light, before home. Four more fields to home.
We were pleased to welcome local guests and Australian visitors for a September celebration on Kelston Roundhill.
Visibility was wonderful, as was the food, music, company. Very best wishes to this young couple who wanted to gather their local friends to celebrate before setting off to start a new life together in Australia.
Guests wander back down the hill to the barn for to the best possible sunset
Catering was for the celebration was provided by local business Wild Fork West.
Guests wandered up to the top of the hill for a musical celebration, and were rewarded with the rare sight from the top of the sun setting spectacularly over the sea by Weston super Mare.
Thanks to the Cotswold Wardens for repairing one of the styles around Kelston clump. They do good work, to a high standard but without municipalising the place.
Billie has set up half a dozen bell tents in the meadow next to Roundhill Barn for the guests of Mark and Emma, who are celebrating at Roundhill Barn this weekend.
They sit on new discreetly improved sites: actually level, and accessed by narrow paths mown through the meadow. Sleep well, wedding guests!
By now Billie has got setting them up down to a fine art. Thanks Billie!
Roundhill Barn hosted an important and moving conversation this week as 24 people gathered to share feelings, experiences and expertise about death.
Participants included doctors, independent undertakers, social prescribers, ritual designers and celebrants, also bereaved friends, children, parents and spouses. We looked at historic perspectives, also medical, consumer, environmental, emotional and spiritual. We heard the still lingering effects – inhibitions and fears – arising from c20th wars and persecution.
The plenary conversation mixed expert contributors with profound personal stories.
It’s a beautiful thing and a great relief to talk openly about a subject which is unavoidable, a universal fact of life and yet somehow taboo. We heard the bizarre example of the headteacher who wrote to say a girl’s mother had died and that no-one at school was to mention it.
We heard awful experiences of people forced into prescriptive and formulaic municipal or religious rituals or processes that overrode their desires and needs. And we heard stories that showed how openness about death and accepting death freed all involved to live life more fully, and how new approaches to undertaking could better meet the emotional and spiritual needs of bereaved people and be far kinder to the environment.
Roundhill Barn is a great place to have such a conversation, especially in the beautiful months: quiet, peaceful, intense. We’d be very happy to work with contemporary funeral directors and celebrants to host memorials which give friends and families time and space to say goodbye in their own way, unrushed, with huge views of the beautiful Somerset countryside.
We ended up with a “death cafe”: four small groups sharing feelings about the subject over tea and cakes.
We talk about births, and we talk about marriages. But we don’t talk much about death. But talking about death won’t make it any more likely to happen. Or any less likely for that matter.
On that basis we’re going to start what we feel is a much-need conversation about the realities of death.
Date: Tue 2 May Time: Starts 1400 (doors open 1300 if you want to bring a sandwich); ends 1700 Place: Roundhill Barn, Kelston (directions here)
There will be tea. There will be cake. We’ll invite a handful of experts and specialists. We can talk about medical aspects, spiritual and emotional dimensions, commercial and consumer realities and the environmental impact.
It’s free of charge (you can contribute); numbers are limited. Email us kelstonroundhill@gmail.com to attend or with any questions.
Kelston Roundhill and Roundhill Barn 