‘We moved to a farmhouse on Anglesey to give our children a better life’

I was brought up in a town, but I have always loved the country. When I was a child I spent all my time at the local riding stables and wanted a lifestyle of having horses and being outside. I wanted the quiet, and the nature, and the space [says Joanne Jones, 47].
Stuart (54) and I have four children, aged between nine and 21, and in around 2013 we moved from Bowdon, which is quite a busy town southwest of Manchester, to a village called Lymm, six miles away. Our house was a typical 1950s semi with four bedrooms.
We moved because we wanted somewhere more green, and Lymm is on the edge of the country but not the truly wild countryside I was after. Stuart had grown up on a farm, and he wanted to be somewhere the children didn’t feel as isolated as he sometimes had and where we didn’t have to drive them everywhere. I had just opened a nursery, Stuart was in the police, and it wasn’t the right time for us to move to the middle of nowhere.
I am a speech and language therapist, and during the pandemic my business went online. Then Stuart decided he was going to take retirement. We thought: “Oh my goodness, we could go anywhere.”
Over the next 12 months we did a bit of a recce of Devon and Cornwall, the east coast of Scotland and the Western Isles, looking for somewhere quite remote.
We had always holidayed on Anglesey in Wales and Stuart had fond memories of going there as a child with his grandparents. In February last year we took a trip there. The weather was wild and the beach was amazing, and you could tell that there was a community there even without all the tourists. It was accessible for the kids too and we thought it may be the place.
The house we found is a farmhouse which was built in the 1750s. Latterly it had belonged to Sir Donald Gibson, an architect, and his wife, Grace, who was a botanist and landscape architect. Donald died in the 1990s and in her later years I presume that Grace had not been up for doing much with the house. It was cold and damp, but it had masses of potential — enough to keep us busy for the next ten years.
We sold our house in Lymm for £530,000 and the farmhouse, which has two acres of garden and land, cost £475,000. We moved in in January.
Our nine-year-old was resistant to the idea of moving. She has to learn Welsh as she’s at a Welsh-speaking school, and she misses her friends. But she is learning to sail, goes skateboarding and swims in the sea with her dad. She looks much healthier and brighter, and now says she’s so happy to be here.
Since January we have had the house rewired and replastered, and fixed the windows. New bathrooms will be our next job — at the moment we only have one shower — and then a new kitchen. Making the kids’ areas liveable was our priority.
We have decided to let the garden just evolve for the first year, as new plants keep on coming up and we have to check an app to work out what they are. We have a grapevine, a fig tree, loads of fruit trees, a pond which needs a bit of love but which will be amazing, and loads of alpines and flowering plants. There is one area that is full of bluebells and gorse and you can see the sea and Snowdonia.
I am getting really into growing vegetables and herbs, and making things like dandelion honey and ivy leaf washing soap, which is the best.
We have chickens arriving soon — they’ve been staying with Stuart’s parents while we get a coop ready — and we are thinking about getting some pygmy goats just to help us maintain the space. We have two dogs, and we have promised the kids a micro pig. I’d also like a couple of horses.
The air is so clean that none of us have been ill since we came, and we just appreciate being here so much. Every day we say how lucky we are and that raises our vibe. Our stress levels have come down now that we don’t have a constant background of noise.