The Story of Wych Elm Glamping
Glenn and Jane moved to Cornwall in July 2015 from Hampshire.
Wych Elm was overgrown and the land was full of old sheds (20ish), a broken down barn, many old fridges & freezers an old caravan that was being used as accommodation by the local wild life, most of this was overgrown by brambles .
The field that is now Wych Elm Glamping was originally two fields with lots of old fencing, barbed wire, broken glass, buried junk, old bath tubs. It was a lot of hard work to clear the field to even begin building yurts.
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The yurts were Jane's bright idea, for some reason she thought that it would all be very simple, all she had to do was convince Glenn that it was a good idea then in her mind everything would simply happen.
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In March 2016 the yurts arrived , at this point Glenn was working away from home so Jane had to enlist the help of her family and the local farmer with his tractor to unload the yurts.
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Glenn came home and set to work building two bases to be the yurt floors, then they set about building the yurts , the first one took two weeks to erect! It was at this point that Glenn decided we were not going to use traditional methods but posts and concrete were in order.
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While doing the yurts Glenn had also been renovating an old horsebox , up cycling it to become toilet and showers.......
We were rather naive thinking that planning permission would be easy.... it wasn't! So the first year with our first two yurts erected and the lovely horsebox conversion we went ahead and rented our yurts out for the twenty eight days allowed without planning or a licence. It was a roaring success, we couldn't believe that we had created something that people wanted so we put in for planning permission again , this time with the help of a planning consultant, in April 2017 we had our planning permission for 5 yurts and the showers, we had our licence and we were ready to go.
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Each year we have made big improvements to our yurts, we added beds instead of futons in the summer of 2017 because we were getting bookings for much longer than a night or two and we realised that futons aren't compatible with a good sleep!
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At the start of 2018 we took delivery of our bespoke made waterproof covers, then the hard work began again, it took a few weeks of working in the cold, wet, wind and mud for just the two of us to get the yurts ready to open on 1st April....but we did it.
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In October 2018 we added mains electricity to the yurts which made our guests very happy although some of our yearly visitors don't use it because they enjoy being totally off grid.
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In March 2019 we added Day Beds so now there is a double and a King or two singles.
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Our latest project is FLUSHING TOILETS , these will be up and running by mid December 2019.
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Our next project is 2 pods in the style of "tiny home log cabins" we are hoping to have these ready for the summer 2020, so watch this space.