Still living off the grid

[Owain]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-48202236

Margaret Gallagher has lived off-grid for almost 80 years.

When she was was born - near the Irish border in County Fermanagh in 1942 - it was not unusual for families to live without electricity and running water. Margaret's neighbours only began to update their homes in the late 1940s and 1950s. But her family missed the opportunity to join the trend due to her mother's death, when Margaret was 10, and her father's ill health. Now aged 77, she is one of few elderly people in the UK and Ireland who have lived their entire lives off-grid.

She must cross a field to collect water in a bucket from a well up to 10 times a day and needs to stoop to cook over an open fire, which she lights every morning from a stack of turf and logs.

"You have the birds in the morning nesting in the house, ...

 

[Flyfisher]

Ahh, the ‘good old days’ :wink:

 

[MatthewC]

We visited the Outer Hebrides last year. It was most surprising to find that whole settlements of people had been still living in wet blackhouses with no electricity, loo or mains water until the 1970s or even 80s!

The blackhouses themselves had a fundamental design flaw: imagine a long rectangular stone structure 5ft high and about 10ft wide, and then add a curved moss/peat(?) roof (shaped like a Nissen hut). The roof comes down and sits in the middle of the stone walls, thus allowing the inhabitants to walk along the visible bit of the wall to do the continual essential maintenance on the roof. However, the result of the design is that water flows continually through the building which is deliberately built on a slope; the water flows down through it, leaving the liveable part higher up the slope with the least water and a very wet working part lower down.

No wonder the life expectancy is lower. Until our visit I really had thought that such conditions were eliminated before WWII - no wonder Scots servicemen were tough.