Growing Together

With no farming experience, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer upped sticks from the south of England to take over a 60-hectare farm in the rugged Cairngorms. After appearing in the BBC series This Farming Life, Lynn tells us how their new life is going, six years on

- By Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer. Photographs by Sandra Angers-Blondin

When we followed our hearts and realised our dreams, life didn’t end up how we thought it would.

In 2016, we turned our backs on life in the busy south-east of England working as rangers for the National Trust, to head north to Scotland and search for some land to buy and live on. Looking back, some might think that was a brave or bold decision, but we never felt that at the time. Our yearning to live a life closer to nature was so strong, it overpowered the worries of what we were leaving behind: the monthly salary, the pension, the close bonds with nearby family and friends. The thought of a life where our own piece of land could provide us with everything we would need had become our obsession.

Scotland was a natural choice, as my partner Sandra is half Scottish and I was happy to go anywhere with wide open spaces and the possibility of affordable land – a prospect that many of us who dream of such an existence often struggle to find. After months of searching and multiple disappointments, we eventually made a breakthrough.

OUR NEW HOME

Lynbreck Croft is a 60-hectare holding – a plot of land 15 times bigger than we had been looking for. It is a patchwork of small fields connected by a strip of woodland and surrounded by a mixture of heather, hill and bog. It sits on the fringe of Abernethy Forest below the foothills of the mighty Cairngorm mountains, the main homestead at an exposed altitude of 350m above sea level.