Page 1 of 1

New member in Devon

Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2018 9:11 am
by OwlHoot
Hi all. I'm a 60 year old would be prepper, and I've already made a start in a modest way.

I formerly lived in London. But finding it too crowded, expensive, full of foreigners, and obviously risky in the event of a SHTF event, decided four years ago to sell and move with my partner to North Devon a mile or two from Exmoor. Luckily as an IT contractor I've found it isn't hard to find contracts in the South West, although the rates are somewhat lower than in the SE. I love Devon, although my partner sometimes finds it a bit boring, with "too many crumblies round here", although we're no spring chickens ourselves!

So far, besides stashing enough food (mostly rice, corned beef, and tuna in sunflower oil) to last several months, my main prepping progress has been to pay a fortune (£5K) for the purchase and installation of an old hand pump to extract water from a covered well in my courtyard. However in the hot weather this summer the water level dipped below the base end of the extraction pipe (which for hand-pumping can't be more than about 30 feet). The snag is I live not far from a disused railway cutting, and I assume groundwater in the local shillet soil must seep out into the cutting and drop in level if not replenished by rain.

Re: New member in Devon

Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2018 2:08 pm
by Arzosah
Welcome to the forum - love the name!

How amazing to have a covered well on your own property! This summer was pretty exceptional, even in modern terms, so hopefully you won't have the problem you mention regularly.

Not sure what the "foreigners" problem is - you'll find quite a few non-UK people on here, plus some UK people who are in other countries, and therefore "foreigners" to them. And quite a few bog-standard UK/English people (of whom I'm one!) have got lots of intermarriage going on, so the littlies have dual nationalities (not so little now! first one was in 1972).

Hope you find lots of useful stuff on here - has your water come back? What do the locals say?

Re: New member in Devon

Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2018 8:25 pm
by Deeps
Welcome to the forum, I'm with Arzosah on the "foreigners" stuff. I'm a well travelled boy (even been out of Fife a couple of times ;) ) and dual nat. All I can say is 'people are people', most of us just want to do well and have a nice life. Its not like we don't have plenty indigenous lowlifes.

I hope you find the site useful though.