Lammas: permission to live on the land
Nine households in west Wales spent years winning the right to build low-impact homes on farmland. Their story is mostly about planning, not buildings.
Most of Leafhouse is about how to build. Lammas is about whether you are allowed to.
The site
Lammas Ecovillage sits at Glandwr, near Crymych in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. Nine households each work a smallholding of about seven acres, with a shared community hub, on a 76-acre site. Residents built their own homes and have planted many thousands of trees.
Getting permission
The project was conceived by Tony Wrench, Paul Wimbush and Larch Maxey. Pembrokeshire’s local Policy 52 allowed people to live off the land, but only under an umbrella organisation, which Lammas became. According to a resident’s account, the group made three planning applications: two were refused and one lapsed. An appeal to the Welsh Assembly in 2009 succeeded, after a three-year campaign that ended in a public hearing. Lammas became the first ecovillage in the UK to receive planning permission in advance of building.
What came after
The Welsh Government then introduced a Wales-wide policy, One Planet Development, which replaced the local policy Lammas had used. It lets people live on rural land if they can show they will meet most of their needs from it. The exact thresholds are set in Welsh Government guidance, which we are checking before we quote them.
Why it matters outside Wales
For many would-be builders, the barrier is not straw or timber. It is zoning, agricultural land rules and the question of whether a house is allowed on a piece of land at all. Lammas is one of the few places where a planning system created a deliberate route for low-impact living, and then wrote it into national policy.
This is a works in progress story. We will update it as we speak with residents, with their permission.
Sources
- Lammas Ecovillage. Wikipedia. · accessed November 4, 2026
- Wales' unique 'one-planet' planning policy and the Lammas Ecovillage. Low Impact. · accessed November 4, 2026
Fact-checked November 4, 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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