Prologue

We moved to Pen Y Bryn in June 2021, well that’s not strictly correct, we bought and received the keys in June, a week before my birthday, but weren’t able to move in properly until the end of September because of all the work we had to do to the small bungalow to make it habitable. There was in fact a lot to do, far more than I had foreseen when agreeing a price for the house and its four acres. New windows almost throughout, new doors, lots of new plastering and in due course a kitchen and a shower room, in fact there is still a lot that needs to be done, but after the initial enthusiastic couple of years we have slowed and other priorities have taken our time and money and energy.

I had neglected to see the failings of the house as I had fallen in love at first sight of the view from the front door. It is a fabulous view that looks to Goodrich Castle, over the Wye Valley, to the Welsh Black Mountains, Sugar Loaf and the Malverns. It is a view to make your heart lighten and your cares wash away. Along with this view was land. Four acres of once kept, but latterly neglected garden and paddocks that filled my imagination in the months between agreeing the purchase and getting the keys. I dreamt of building a pond on the day we signed the contract, of growing vegetables or flowers, and of rescuing four ex-commercial chickens.

Of course Kelly had seen every failing of the house and every hole in my romantic notions, but she let me get on with it. She would nod her head gently each time I vocalised an ambition for our new home and quietly made sure that we could afford it and that we could get a mortgage. Which in itself was quite a feat. We had some money for a deposit, but my advancing years – I didn’t realise that 52 was advancing years but the bank certainly put me straight on that, and my lack of a recognised occupation and salary – a self-employed musician doesn’t tick any boxes, were almost insurmountable issues. Fortunately Kelly is well educated, well qualified and had a good steady income, in fact if she didn’t have me to contend with she would have had no problems getting a mortgage offer. Somehow she batted enough eyelids to the online forms that eventually she got it sorted and I could begin to envisage my dreams.

The day I took possession of the keys and turned up at the house I felt a rising panic as soon as I turned into the drive. The height of the grass in itself caused me some anxiety but then when I walked through the front door and into the kitchen I almost collapsed in sheer terror, at which moment my phone rang.

It was Kelly.

‘You in?’ she asked curiously and with no great level of excitement.

‘Yep,’ I answered simply.

‘You ok?’ she replied, ‘you sound like there’s something up’.

‘I’m fine,’ I said wondering how on earth I was going to explain the state of the kitchen to her, or perhaps get it sorted before she turned up.

‘Where are you?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘In the kitchen.’ I answered.

‘Oh,’ silence. Then, ‘you ok?’

Pathetically I replied, ‘there’s a lot of work to be done’.

‘Yes, I know. Have you been in the dining room yet?’

‘The dining room? No, why?’

‘Go into the dining room’. I did as I was told. Not something, I am proud to say that I do very often.

‘Oh my god!’

‘Yes,’ Kelly responded.

‘What do you mean yes? Did you know it was this bad?’ The dining room was worse than the kitchen and the kitchen had given me grotesque heart palpitations, plaster was blown and falling from the walls, there were black patches of damp round the windows and the carpet was age stained beyond recognition of what its original colour had been.

‘Yes, I knew.’ Kelly calmly, offhandedly answered.

‘You knew?’ I blurted out. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘I knew because I saw it all the moment we stepped into the house, but you saw none of it. All you saw was the view and the space. But I knew you wanted it, so I knew we’d sort it. It will be fine.’

I relaxed immediately. In fairness I knew I could live anywhere if I had to and if I had good reason. But the thought of what Kelly would make of it had filled me with terror. Fear that this time I had really let her down big time.

And it was fine. Pen Y Bryn for all its aging and weathering had been loved and would be loved again. We spent time, energy and money on the house and worked hard on trying to get to grips with the outside. All of which for someone who was not adept with any type of tool (although I have been regarded as one on many an occasion) and who lacked knowledge of anything useful to a garden was quite a feat. But if you are keen and want to learn, you do and it doesn’t take a lot.

After two years we had made an impact, we had a home that was by no means finished, but was our home and we loved it, but there was still something lacking. I felt blessed, privileged to have this land and I wanted to make every square inch valued. My parents had had land, from the age of ten we had lived in an unattractive 1960s house that looked more like a squash court or library from the outside than it did a home, but it was bang in the middle of ten acres. Not just a garden but fields and a barn that I absolutely loved. I used to draw plans of how when I was older I would make use of the land, how I would have it teeming with life and optimised for the best. The unloved, half-forgotten huge pond would become a haven for all manner of water life. The fir tree copses would be sanctuaries for all kinds of indigenous wildlife, there would be sheep and pigs and cattle and goats and ponies and chickens and ducks and anything else that needed my help. But I have never felt that anything has really, properly been done with the land. The garden was and is well kept, Mum grows a few vegetables and she has had the occasional chicken or two. The fields have been cut for hay most years and the pond is still there – wet in the winter, dry in the summer. But so much more could have been done, and most tragically of all, the great, but ugly barn with its stalls and tack room has been bereft of an equine hoof step for over forty years.

I was adamant that with my glorious four acres every blade of grass, every stone, every rise and every fall would be valued and would have a place of its own, not an inch would be forgotten or unappreciated.

For a while I floundered between notions of turning everything over to gardens with flowers and shrubs and walkways and terraces and ponds and dreams at every turn, and ideas of being completely self-sufficient like Tom and Barbara Good. Then at some point, after a succession of certain happenstances, the arrival of a selection of random animals through a variety of reasons, Kelly and I found ourselves chatting one early summer’s evening in 2023. Neither of us can really remember what we were particularly talking about or where the subject was going, but one of us, and neither of us know which one it was, but one of us suggested to the other that we should turn our home into an animal sanctuary.

Whichever one of us didn’t suggest it, said that that was just what they had been thinking about but didn’t think that the other would be in favour of it. And so in that moment we decided and immediately we started making plans and it wouldn’t be long before those plans were put into action and the Pen Y Bryn Animal Sanctuary was registered.

The real story of Pen Y Bryn then begins, because the story is a multitude of stories of precious residents that came to reside with us. Some have the simplest of stories, some have quite complicated tales, some spent a tiny amount of time here, some have now spent years. Every single life, every story is individual, precious and treasured and I really hope that you will enjoy coming with me on this journey of some of the tales that have come to be at Pen Y Bryn.