The Vision of the Wilderness Trust
Empowering our community to thrive in harmony with nature, The Wilderness Trust envisions a sustainable future where creativity, compassion, and resilience unite to foster a vibrant local economy and a deep connection to our natural world.
Mission
The Hanging Gardens is dedicated to nurturing community resilience and creativity in Llanidloes and its surrounding area by providing a vibrant hub for sustainable living, artistic expression, and shared experiences through our café, performing arts centre, indoor market, community garden, and workshops.
The Wilderness Trust came into being in the 1980s in Shropshire and moved over the border into Wales in 1988.
Old Chapel Farm, the Trust’s base, has been an ongoing experiment in Sustainable Living. We have learned from the land, learned from our neighbours, made plenty of mistakes and learned from those too. With parallel work in archaeology, we have learned from the past. Ours has been a journey in community – living with very diverse people from all over the world, exchanging skills, sharing ideas, fears and the joys of living on the land.
The rising profile of the climate and nature crisis made us wonder what sustainable living would look like on a community scale. It’s easy enough to find solutions on a farm with plenty of land and resources. But a community needs the inputs of so many people with different perspectives if it is to provide valuable insights into the ways we deal with future challenges in an unstable world.
A place in the town where people could come together as a focus for sustainable living was a day dream spun whilst carrying out the most mundane of tasks in field or cow pen. Never really expected to actually happen! But the site in Bethel St was big enough to bring together all the ingredients that we deemed essential to give such a project a chance of working – integrating spaces for growing, the Arts, traditional heritage crafts/skills training, social projects, market, and opportunities for sustainable building (bit too much of that!), renewable energy use.
We do believe that this is an incredibly important time to be alive. The decisions we make now will have greater impact than at any time in our history. This is a huge opportunity. It’s an exciting time, though daunting, because we can all make a difference to the way things unfold. This project is designed to enable everyone feeling stressed by worries about the future to feel the joy of doing something really connected – whether here, in our own homes, our county or on the other side of the world.
This is about what we can do, as volunteers, to feel more hopeful about the future by thinking and working together, forging our future rather than letting it just happen to us.
The Hanging Gardens is a Wilderness Trust Project. Other Projects are based on the land within the Llanidloes area.
The Vision of the Wilderness Trust
