The Farm and Us

Who We Are

We thought we should start by introducing ourselves. We are Amanda and Peter Copp and we live here with our sons Sam and Harry. Lower Glyn Farm is a beautiful 80 acre valley farm in the Usk Valley situated in the heart of the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Amanda runs Hidden Valley Yurts and The Authentic Mongolian Yurt Co. Ltd (the yurt sales side of the business) fulltime as well as breeding Alpacas and Jacob and Badger faced sheep. Peter started life as a sailmaker and now has a day job selling high tensile membrane structures - the high tech end of the fabric building industry and about as far as you can get from yurt construction!

We moved here in January 2003 and it's been a bit of a whirlwind since then - life here has certainly livened up since we started selling yurts - we've met such an interesting range of people, been a BBC location for a reality TV show and developing the yurt 'campsite' although hard work, has been great fun. In particular it was satisfying building felling and milling timber from the farm to build the yurt barn, decks and kitchen/shower block. We do sometimes wonder what our neighbours think - alpacas from Peru, yurts from Mongolia, what next....

The Farm

We farm under an environmental scheme called Tir Gofal (Care of the Land). This means we farm to encourage diversity of species for plants, birds and wildlife - the land was badly overgrazed when we moved here and it is rewarding to see the diversity increasing year on year. We have 43 acres of mainly native broadleaf including some ancient woodland with just one last plantation of ex forestry larch left to fell and 37 acres of old meadows - rich in wildflowers and herbage. We have rare birds, several varieties of bat and otters, dormice and crested newts have all been seen (though not by us!). Every day we watch buzzards circling overhead and the lake is visited by herons and a kingfisher (re-stocking the lake with fish gives new meaning to feeding the birds).

We are a Gwent Wildlife Trust best site and are members of Monmouthshire Meadows Group - both these organizations have undertaken several surveys of the plants, insects, butterflies and birds.