Birch Cottage has a new website of its own
Visit the Birch Cottage website to bookWelcome to Lackan Cottage Farm
We’re Steve and Claire Golemboski-Byrne, we live here off grid with our daughter, our dog, cats and horses. We make all our own energy using wind and solar, grow as much of our own food as we can (it varies widely) and have used permaculture design principles to help us create a great place to live.
Here on the website you’ll find stories about the projects we’ve undertaken – what works, what doesn’t. You can come stay in our guest cottage – Birch Cottage and we will show you round, or maybe you just want to find out how to do some of this stuff. Either way, welcome.
Accommodation closed until further notice
We've now closed Birch Cottage and the Off Grid Horse box until June at the earliest, and we'll take a decision on reopening based on government advice. Thanks for your understanding.
Looking forward to spring
A busy week in the garden, we've tidied up all the beds that have crops in - the chickens had been wandering and taken advantage of the lack of netting on one or two things, so we've covered those properly, and cleaned up decomposing leaves that are such an attraction...
True North
Back in 2019 we spent a few days filming with Jon Thompson and he made this excellent short film for the BBC True North series, about our life off grid. We're really pleased with the way its turned out, and were delighted to take part in a well attended Q&A...
Brendan and Gerry
Our wind turbine is like a family member - we've got used to its various noises, from a gentle thrum of a light breeze to the light aircraft sound it makes in a high wind, and a variety of rumbles in between. So at first, I wasn't sure whether I could hear a new...
Barra on the Bann
One of the best aspects of life here is that we get to try our hand at things that we'd never thought of. Filming is one of them, and over the last few years we've been involved in quite a few programmes. They've been great for introducing what we do here to a wider...
Wood pellet boiler adventures
Sometimes we're just cruising along doing our thing and a project arrives out of the blue. In this case it came in the form of our largest freecycle ever, courtesy of Leo, who had spotted it and decided it was too big a thing to deal with. 'It' is a Czech made Ponast...