Living in Circles: The Reality of Off-Grid Living in a Yurt in Wales

My relationship with yurts started long before I ever decided to live in one. In fact, the first yurt that became important to me wasn't in Mongolia, on a windswept hillside or even particularly close to nature. It was inside a room in the middle of Cardiff.

Yurt in the City was exactly what it said on the tin: a yurt, in the city. It sat inside Meanwhile House, a building filled with rooms occupied by an eclectic collection of Cardiff creatives. Our neighbours included Cardiff FM, tattooists and set designers, and right next door was an excellent cake maker who would regularly slip me cheeky samples when I was there. Inside our room was this completely different world. Hanging plants, wall hangings, ornaments from India and, suspended from the crown of the yurt, a beautiful installation of dried flowers. It was warm, inviting and womb-like. There was something about stepping through the doorway that changed the atmosphere immediately. People would regularly comment that they could feel their nervous system begin to settle almost as soon as they entered. There was something beautifully incongruous about the soft, circular warmth of a yurt nestled inside the cold, angular walls of an old concrete building, two entirely different ways of inhabiting a space existing together.

The space was owned and run by Marcos, and it is difficult to write about the beginning of my work with sound without writing about him. He was pivotal in it. Marcos gave me the space to hold my first ever public sound journey at Yurt in the City. I can still remember how nervous I was. I waited for everyone to close their eyes before I could properly relax. Once nobody was looking at me, I could finally get on with it.

That first session became another, and another. I began holding regular sound journeys there, alongside the many other practitioners who used the yurt. Marcos then gave me my first opportunity to take the work to a festival, inviting me to offer sound journeys at Blue Lagoon. At the time I couldn't possibly have known how many threads would eventually lead back to those experiences, or how important that particular festival would become in another part of my life.

Marcos later passed away, leaving a huge hole in Cardiff's holistic community. For a period afterwards, a collective of us tried to keep Yurt in the City going. I will always be grateful to his partner Abi for how accommodating and understanding she was during that time. The yurt had become more than somebody's business. It was an important community space, and I think many of us wanted to protect some of what Marcos had created. But community spaces still exist in the real world. Like any community, our little collective had its issues, and sometimes no amount of trusting spirit, good intentions and woo-woo faith without action is enough to pay increasing city-centre rent. Eventually, we couldn't keep it going.

Before it disappeared, though, the yurt continued to mutate into whatever people needed it to be. I opened it up to other creatives as well as practitioners. One afternoon Cardiff MC Enbe voice-noted me, announcing that he wanted to film a music video in the yurt and that his partner and I would need to wear goat masks. Naturally, we did. His conscious lyrics somehow fitted perfectly with the surroundings, although I'm not sure Marco's original vision for the space had specifically included me appearing in a music video dressed as a goat.

That was part of the magic of the place. It wasn't precious. It could hold sound journeys, holistic practitioners, artists, musicians, strange ideas and people simply needing somewhere different to be. It was a circle inside a square room inside a creative building in the middle of a city.

Years later, Blue Lagoon, the festival where Marcos had first given me an opportunity, became the place where The Groove Temple had its first festival jam: acoustic instruments around a fire in a natural amphitheatre. Another circle of people gathering around another centre. I didn't recognise the connection at the time. Looking backwards, these things have a habit of joining themselves together.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, another yurt appeared. In April 2024, a friend of my partner Nick advertised a little four-metre yurt on Facebook for £750. It was rustic to say the least: a small wooden crown, an old burner, a single layer of canvas and no felt insulation. We didn't have anywhere sensible to put it. We didn't have a plan for it. We certainly weren't planning to live in it. So obviously, Nick bought it.

It took up most of my small garden in Tremorfa. She was tiny, wonky, cosy and completely charming. Later, when we moved her to our friend's land near St Clears, she became a party den. We'd decorate her with trippy lights and whatever nonsense fitted the theme, make themed cocktails and disappear inside. Someone once described her as a treehouse, which made absolutely no architectural sense and yet somehow described her perfectly. At parties she became a portal: somewhere to step away from everything else, chill out, tune in and, occasionally, drop out. Wink wink.

Eventually a winter storm got her. The trellis folded in on itself and she never quite recovered. We had hoped to save all of her, but some of the roof poles ended up outside rather than under cover and eventually rotted. We still have the canvas, the old burner and her surprisingly delicate little crown. Pieces of her remain.

What I didn't realise at the time was that the most important thing that happened inside that little yurt had nothing to do with parties. Nick and I had talked vaguely before about buying land one day. It was one of those distant conversations people have about the life they might eventually live. But in October 2024, during a party at St Clears, we sat inside that tiny four-metre circle and had the conversation that changed it from fantasy into possibility. What if we actually moved there? What if we lived on our friend's land first? What if we stopped talking about living differently and tried it?

We'd bought the yurt six months earlier simply because £750 seemed too good a bargain to turn down. We hadn't bought it because we were going off-grid. But somehow the conversation that eventually took us off-grid happened inside it. I wonder how many timeline-changing conversations have happened underneath a yurt crown.

There is another detail that makes what happened next seem even more ridiculous in retrospect. Nick and I had never lived together. We had never shared a home or learned all the ordinary negotiations that come with sharing domestic space with another human being. Our first attempt at doing that would eventually involve moving into a twenty-two-foot circular room together. No bedrooms, no spare room and no corners. Sharing a home with another person is apparently not difficult enough, so we decided to increase the difficulty setting.

At the time, whether I was lying beneath the dried flowers at Yurt in the City or drinking ridiculous cocktails inside our scruffy little party yurt, I wasn't thinking about the generations of people who had built, dismantled, transported and rebuilt circular homes long before a yurt ever appeared inside a creative warehouse in Cardiff. I certainly didn't understand why the circle would become so important to me. I just kept finding myself inside one.

What the circle already knew

Of course, yurts were not waiting around for me, Marcos, the Cardiff holistic community or Facebook Marketplace to discover them. By the time I began my own slightly obsessive relationship with circular living, variations of portable circular homes had been part of life across Central and Inner Asia for millenia. In Mongolia the home is generally known as a ger, while related dwellings have different names, traditions and meanings across the peoples of the region. It is worth making that distinction because the word yurt, particularly in the West, can make it sound as though there was one universal tent inhabited by one universal group of nomadic people. There wasn't.

The more I learned about them, the more I realised how little of the design was arbitrary. A collapsible wooden lattice forms the walls, roof poles reach towards a circular crown and layers of felt traditionally wrap around the structure. Wool from animals living alongside the household could become insulation, animal hair could become ropes and timber created the skeleton. Even the circular shape, which I had mostly romanticised, was doing a job. There are no large flat walls for the wind to hit head-on, and the flexible structure creates something remarkably strong without making it permanent. The extraordinary idea was that the home itself could move. Historically, traditional Mongolian yurts, or gers, were designed not only for portability and protection from the elements but also with security in mind. Their outward-opening doors were harder to force inward, while the interlocking wooden trellis walls created a surprisingly resilient structure that could help obstruct weapons such as spears.

There is something about that way of living that I find particularly compelling now. Life had to remain responsive to what was happening outside the walls. Seasons mattered. Grazing mattered. Animals mattered. Weather mattered. I don't want to romanticise that as some idyllic existence permanently "in tune with nature"; pastoral life could be demanding and survival depended upon practical knowledge and hard work. But nature wasn't scenery viewed through a window. It influenced what happened next.

I would eventually discover a much smaller version of that relationship myself. Living in a yurt in West Wales made the weather impossible to ignore. Wind stopped being something happening vaguely outside and became information. Rain had a sound. Temperature changed what we did with the fire. I began checking forecasts with an enthusiasm bordering on obsession. Conventional houses are extraordinarily good at allowing us to forget the conditions beyond them. A yurt is considerably less interested in maintaining that illusion.

Traditional ger craftsmanship also makes the Western fantasy of the lone off-grid individual look slightly ridiculous. The skills involved in making and moving a ger were traditionally shared through households and communities. Timber had to be prepared, felt made, covers sewn, ropes produced and the structure assembled. Children learned by watching and participating alongside older generations. The knowledge of how to make home was stored in people.

I particularly enjoyed discovering this after watching the World Nomad Games, where teams compete to see who can erect a traditional dwelling fastest. At the 2016 Games in Kyrgyzstan, one team reportedly assembled a boz ui in ten minutes and sixteen seconds. I watched people moving around these structures with the efficiency of a Formula One pit crew while remembering our own experiences of standing around pieces of timber trying to work out what went where. Apparently something I regarded as a significant off-grid achievement is, elsewhere, a competitive event people can complete before I have properly finished a cigarette.

The inside of the traditional ger fascinated me too because removing physical walls didn't remove social structure. Different areas could hold different meanings. Where you sat mattered, how you entered mattered and the hearth mattered. The space could look completely open while still containing invisible boundaries between host and guest, sacred and ordinary, centre and edge. I find that fascinating in the context of community because it suggests something very human: remove the physical walls and we will still create social ones.

Architecture even shaped movement. Traditional Mongol Biyelgee developed in part within the restricted space of the ger, with dancers using intricate movements of the upper body, arms and shoulders rather than requiring a huge dance floor. That particularly appealed to me because it illustrated something I would eventually learn through much less elegant means: you do not always make the yurt adapt to you. Sometimes you adapt yourself to the yurt.

You walk differently because there is a fire in the middle. You organise belongings differently because there are no corners. You pay attention to the seasons because the landscape affects what happens next. The ger could hold an extraordinary amount of life within one circle: cooking, sleeping, receiving guests, raising children, music, ceremony and celebrations. One space changed purpose as life moved through it.

Our yurt would eventually become bedroom, living room, music room, animal house, sanctuary, argument chamber, social space and occasionally somewhere I stood wondering what the hell that noise outside was.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from looking backwards at the history, though, was that the traditional portable home wasn't necessarily about escaping community. That was partly a modern fantasy I had projected onto it. In the Western imagination, yurts have become entangled with eco-retreats, festivals, glamping, spirituality and alternative living. They offer an appealing image of stepping outside conventional society: fewer walls, fewer possessions, a wood burner, some land and the possibility that if we can just get far enough away from everything, life might somehow become simpler. I had absorbed plenty of that mythology myself.

Yet the history told a more complicated story. The physical home could move while knowledge, relationships, animals, skills and traditions moved with it. Living more directly with nature didn't mean withdrawing from other people. If anything, the knowledge and labour required to live that way made other people more important. fTheir culture was not rooted in the land, but carried with them wherever they went.

Looking back, perhaps my own yurts had been trying to tell me something similar. Marco's yurt gathered practitioners, musicians, artists and people looking for somewhere to breathe in the middle of Cardiff. Our tiny four-metre yurt became a portal at parties and eventually the place where Nick and I seriously discussed stepping outside our conventional lives. Blue Lagoon became another circle around a fire. Again and again there was a circle, people and something in the middle. I had thought yurts represented escape. So far, mine had mostly resulted in more people turning up.

Building our own

When Nick and I finally decided to move to our friend's land near St Clears, we hadn't actually decided to live in a yurt at all. We had agreed to change our lives before we'd worked out what we were going to live them in. We considered caravans, campervans and various other possibilities, complicated slightly by the fact that we weren't just finding somewhere for two humans. We had animals coming too.

Then we found a second-hand yurt advertised online. A man in Dorset was retiring from running a glamping site and selling everything. He had three nineteen-foot yurts and two twenty-two-foot yurts, and if you happened to have ten thousand pounds and an unexplained desire to acquire an entire yurt village, you could buy the lot. We didn't.

We went intending to look at a nineteen-foot one. When the owner discovered we actually intended to live in it, he suggested we step inside a twenty-two-foot yurt before deciding. Three feet doesn't sound particularly life-changing until those three feet are added to the diameter of a circle. The difference was enormous. Suddenly it didn't feel like somewhere we might squeeze ourselves and our animals into while pretending to enjoy alternative living. It felt like a home. That was the one.

It cost £2,500 and came with a hand-painted wooden frame, lattice walls, roof poles, crown, cotton lining, huge pieces of thick felt insulation, waterproof outer layers, burner and flue. The frame was painted blue with patterns in yellow, green and red. It was beautiful. Getting our new home from Dorset to West Wales took two journeys. On one, we discovered that the crown simply would not fit inside the van, so this enormous hand-painted wooden circle travelled down British roads strapped to the roof. There is something wonderfully undignified about transporting the centrepiece of your future home in a way that makes you look as though you've robbed a particularly eccentric garden centre.

Before we could put any of it up, though, we needed somewhere for it to stand. We were building on a slope in West Wales, a part of the world not exactly renowned for prolonged periods of drought. Nick began constructing an enormous wooden platform across the slope. This was not the quick part. It took weeks.

Before the decking went down, you could stand inside the exposed geometric frame and see the skeleton of what would eventually hold our home. At the time I was at the beginning of my Medicine Woman training and exploring ceremony, rites of passage and working consciously with the changing seasons. Nick and I were also creating the foundations of the first home we would share. It felt like a threshold.

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So before the platform disappeared beneath decking, I created an altar and mandala across the timber using flowers and plants. We placed quartz crystals within the geometry of the structure, positioned in relation to both our birth charts, creating what we thought of as a ring of protection around the home that would eventually stand above them. We set our intentions there, surrounded by nothing yet resembling a house.

Whatever somebody believes about astrology, crystals or ceremony, the act itself mattered to me. It marked the moment between imagining a different life and actually stepping into it. Then the ceremony ended and Nick had to carry on building the bloody platform. I have always quite liked that combination. Beneath our home would be a crystal grid aligned with our birth charts. Beneath that was a carefully engineered wooden structure designed to stop the entire thing sliding downhill into several inches of Welsh rainwater. The practical and spiritual have always coexisted quite happily in my world.

It was April 2025, around my birthday, when the yurt itself finally went up. Because apparently moving off-grid and constructing our future home wasn't enough activity, we were also preparing the site for a party. I thought perhaps we could wait. Nick and a friend did not. The platform may have been serious construction, but the yurt itself was enormous Meccano and they wanted to build it immediately.

Much of this happened in the dark under a single floodlight because timing became irrelevant once they were enjoying themselves. There were three of us working on the main structure and it took roughly a day. Ten minutes and sixteen seconds, it was not. For a while, putting up a yurt feels less like architecture and more like trying to persuade a very large wooden animal to stand. Then suddenly something changes. The lattice holds, the roof poles radiate towards the crown and begin supporting one another, and the pile of strangely shaped wooden components we'd transported from Dorset becomes a twenty-two-foot circle. Our circle.

We pulled the cotton lining over the structure and added the enormous pieces of felt. The waterproof outer layer, however, could apparently wait. It was sunny, there wasn't supposed to be rain and there was a party to finish setting up. So naturally, we left our newly erected home wearing its highly absorbent felt layers and carried on. Then it started raining.

Thank God for sober friend. He came running into the jam space to remind us that unless we wanted several thousand pounds' worth of yurt insulation to become an enormous wet, sheep-smelling sponge, we needed to get the waterproof cover on immediately. Three of us ran across the site and started hauling it over. Then Nick transformed into some kind of off-grid Spider-Man, monkey-climbed his way up the central supports and pulled the Perspex crown cover across while rain came down around us.

It was chaotic and absolutely hilarious. Made brighter and funnier by the dose of psychedelic medicine I had consumed. I wonder how stressful that would have been sober.  Perhaps there was something appropriate about the yurt's first lesson arriving before we'd even finished building it. We could make plans. The weather did not care.

Learning to live in it

Inside, I had imagined something resembling photographs of beautiful glamping accommodation: rugs, cosy furniture, soft lighting, everything intentionally arranged and effortlessly bohemian. Instead, all our belongings arrived. We had downsized considerably, but everything we still owned now had to exist in one twenty-two-foot circle. Clothes, paperwork, instruments, personal belongings, dog stuff, cat stuff and the ordinary debris of two people's lives lined the edges. Then there was Nick's stuff.

Nick is a maker and has an extraordinary ability to look at something most people would consider scrap and see what it might become. This is an excellent quality when you need somebody to construct a platform on the side of a hill or build something useful from materials other people would throw away. It is slightly less wonderful when the potentially useful object is going to sit beside your bed for the next twelve months waiting for its moment of destiny.

We had accidentally created one of the fundamental questions of our first shared home: was this a home, a workshop or a shed? Initially, it felt a little like camping in a tent masquerading as a storage unit. I would walk around in circles endlessly, attempting to organise and clean or find something I had misplaced since moving in. 

Gradually, though, it became ours. Our bed went onto pallets, rugs covered the wooden floor, an old coffee table became shelving and storage, and eventually we each had a chest of drawers each. Plants I'd owned for years hung around the edges and suddenly something familiar from my previous life was growing inside this strange new one. Nick got our power running remarkably quickly using old batteries and solar.

The things that improved our lives weren't particularly glamorous. Shelves were revolutionary. Steps onto the deck were revolutionary. The porch we eventually built from mismatched old window frames was revolutionary. Our kitchen started beneath an outdoor awning before the reality of living in Wales encouraged us to buy a small sun house and turn that into something considerably more weatherproof.

A wheelbarrow was practically a spiritual awakening. We lived at the bottom of a steep track, and before the wheelbarrow every food shop, bag and random thing we'd brought home had to be carried down. Suddenly we could do it in one journey. I don't think anybody who has always had a driveway has ever experienced the appropriate level of gratitude for a wheel.

Our toilet was a shared long-drop inside a pallet cubicle. For months we washed in a bucket or stood beneath a cold outdoor shower, the water gaining whatever warmth the summer sun had managed to bestow upon the exposed pipes. Then came the bath: an outdoor bath sheltered by old window frames with a power shower. It was magical. Luxury, I discovered, is entirely relative. We didn't have a fridge for a year. I have a tiny one now in the truck and I appreciate that little fridge more than I ever appreciated the enormous American-style fridge I once had. Had I simply replaced the big one with a small one, I probably would have considered it a downgrade. Go without one for a year and suddenly a tiny fridge is evidence that you have made it in life.

Living there kept doing that to me. Things I'd barely noticed when they were permanently available became extraordinary when they returned. At the same time, things I'd once considered necessary quietly stopped being necessary at all. I'd heard people say that we don't actually need very much plenty of times before, but there is a difference between intellectually agreeing with that and discovering that your happiness has survived the disappearance of things you previously considered basic. There was something incredibly freeing about letting stuff go. The space it left wasn't empty, either. It became filled with other things.

In winter there wasn't much time to become bored with off-grid living because staying warm required work. Wood had to be found, moved, cut and stored. We learned which wood burned well and how to pack the burner before bed so we didn't wake up freezing at three in the morning. I also learned this through a slightly more dramatic method. One day I was alone in the yurt and had packed the burner with cheap garage wood. After a while I noticed that the yurt was becoming extraordinarily warm. Not cosy. More like a sauna. Then there was a huge pop. I looked up and saw glowing embers shooting from the top of the flue. The chimney was on fire.

I ran outside, grabbed a saucepan and started throwing water from the stream over the canvas while embers flew around me in the wind. I phoned Nick, who talked me through opening the burner and removing pieces of wood that were more than a hundred degrees hot, transferring them into a frying pan and getting them outside. It wasn't one of my more serene moments of living in harmony with nature. Ironically, before moving into the yurt, one of the things people repeatedly warned me about was how cold I'd be. Nobody warned me that sometimes I'd be sitting inside a canvas structure in the depths of a Welsh winter desperately trying not to cook myself. A wood burner doesn't have a thermostat, and neither does West Wales.

We watched the weather constantly. If high winds were forecast, we'd tighten the enormous ratchet straps running over the yurt. If we went away and the weather changed, we'd worry about her. Sometimes one of us would stay behind specifically to make sure everything was okay. Weather stopped being background information and became part of the household.

That wasn't entirely a burden. Because of the crown, we woke naturally with the morning light every day, and I noticed the effect that had on my wellbeing. At night, the full moon could illuminate the entire yurt. On clear nights the stars in West Wales were so bright that sometimes you barely needed a head torch, although for the record a head torch is another item I now consider one of civilisation's greatest achievements.

A small stream ran around the yurt and down towards the pond, so there was almost always the sound of moving water. I loved that. Birds gathered on the deck, wind moved the canvas and rain had its own vocabulary depending on how heavily it was falling. The natural world wasn't something we travelled somewhere to experience. It was constantly interrupting us. Perhaps that was the biggest shift. Letting go of possessions hadn't left an empty space. It had been replaced by cutting wood, watching weather, noticing light, listening to water, learning what the fire was doing and knowing when the wind was changing. By letting go of things, somehow I had become more connected to everything around me.

There is nowhere to hide in a circle

Of course, there were two of us discovering all of this together, and if living in a yurt exposed us to the elements, it also exposed us to each other. Nick and I had never lived together before. In hindsight, choosing one circular room as our first shared home was madness. There was nowhere to go if we argued. There was no bedroom door to close, no spare room to retreat into and no kitchen to stomp off to dramatically because the kitchen was outside.

Our different attitudes towards cleanliness, clutter, possessions and priorities were suddenly visible all of the time. Every object required a decision. What was important enough to take up space? Whose definition of useful won? How much mess was acceptable? When does a collection of potentially useful materials become a pile of crap? These are perhaps not the great philosophical questions traditionally associated with intentional living, but they became ours.

We had to decide together what mattered enough to remain inside our circle because one person's possessions immediately became part of the other person's environment. In a conventional house, you can hide quite a lot of difference behind doors. We didn't have any. Our habits, priorities and disagreements were exposed almost as completely as the canvas was exposed to the elements.

But there was another side to that. We proved to ourselves that we could do it. We could live with less. We could generate our own power. We could adapt to cold showers, strange toilets, unpredictable weather and a home that occasionally required somebody to stand outside tightening ratchet straps in a storm. More importantly, we enjoyed huge parts of it.

I had imagined going off-grid as stepping away from something. Instead, I became more connected to what was immediately around me: weather, daylight, water, fire and the person I was sharing twenty-two feet of circular space with. And, perhaps inevitably, conflict.

Because living differently doesn't make us less human. The yurt didn't remove the dynamics that exist whenever people try to live alongside one another. If anything, it made them harder to ignore. Remove the walls and we still create territories. Remove excess possessions and we still have to negotiate resources. Step outside conventional society and we don't suddenly step outside power, difference, irritation, compromise or somebody else's inexplicable attachment to a piece of wood they insist will definitely be useful one day. I think that is what living in circles eventually taught me.

Perhaps the places we live and the communities we build are mirrors as much as they are shelters. The yurt showed me parts of myself I probably wouldn’t have noticed in an ordinary house. I could forget to chop wood and then feel annoyed that Nick hadn’t done it, as though keeping us warm had somehow become his job without us ever agreeing that it was. I worried about my things getting damaged or lost amongst his piles of tools, scrap and things he was definitely going to find a use for one day. Sometimes I resented how much of the space his stuff occupied, while quietly protecting my own things as though they had more right to be there. We were living together, but that didn’t automatically mean we were co-creating a home. We had to work out what mattered, what stayed, who did what and whose idea of comfortable we were actually building around. Maybe community works in much the same way. It doesn’t necessarily create our contradictions, expectations or blind spots; sometimes it just puts them somewhere we can finally see them.

I'd thought going off-grid might be an escape from some of the structures of ordinary life. Instead, it brought me closer to the oldest structure there is: people trying to work out how to live alongside one another. Our little community happened to contain two humans, animals, a wood burner, several questionable pieces of scrap and absolutely nowhere to hide. It wasn't always peaceful. It wasn't supposed to be.

A community without conflict isn't necessarily a healthy community. Sometimes it is simply one where nobody is saying what they really think. Perhaps the point isn't to build a life without friction, but to build one capable of holding it. For a while, ours was twenty-two feet wide, held down by ratchet straps against the West Wales wind, with crystals underneath the floor. And it was home. There is an interesting parallel between the friction needed to start a fire and the friction that inevitably arises between two people sharing a home. We often see disagreement as something destructive, something to avoid, but friction is also what creates a spark. Without it, there can be no fire; too much of it, and the whole thing can burn down. Perhaps the art of living together isn't about eliminating friction, but learning how to tend the fire it creates.