Smallholding profile: Pocket House Studio

Helen Babbs visits a thriving Hebridean croft and weaving studio

- Helen Babbs

When Andrew and Chris Hammacott first arrived at their smallholding in the outer Hebrides, Chris wanted to go right home again. “I’m London born and bred, we’d had a nice house in Wales, and there we were in the middle of nowhere on the Isle of Lewis, in a damp run-down croft house that had trees planted right up against the windows so one couldn’t see out, and it was night-time when we got there, of course,” she recalls dramatically. “I remember standing in the kitchen and wailing to Andrew ‘I just want to go home! What are we doing here?!?’

“Being a sensible chap, Andrew said ‘This is home now’ and went out and bought me three sheep that very week, just to remind me why we wanted to do this.” Twelve years, four dozen sheep and a bit of house renovation later, Chris admits, tongue-in-cheek, that “there are compensations”. Only a few minutes walk across their 10 acre croft is the beach – “four miles of golden sands, mostly all to ourselves apart from the put-put of little fishing boats going past. Behind our house is open moorland, with red deer and a patch of woodland with ravens, and if we stand outside on a winter night, we can see the Northern Lights.” 

BORN TO WEAVE

Chris and Andrew’s journey to becoming smallholders started with weaving. “I learned spinning and weaving as part of a six month apprenticeship when I was 18,” explains Chris, “and that was over 40 years ago. Then when I met Andrew, I taught him to weave too. I loved rare breeds wool, and worked with the RBST promoting it – we’d take our looms round to the major shows and weave ‘in public’!”