Category: United Kingdom

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London hermit loses hut

London hermit Daniel Pike (https://hermitary.com/around/?p=1360) has lost his bid to keep his hut. As a Daily Mail byline notes:

Daniel Pike built his home in a forest on the outskirts of a north London from clay and other foraged items. 28-year-old lived there for four years after being made homeless but Woodland Trust demanded he leave. Today he watched in tears as structure was destroyed, leaving just a flat plot of land where it once stood. He was arrested for obstructing a court official as it happened and is now living in his mother’s house.

URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1332003/Modern-day-hermit-s-handmade-home-destroyed-legal-battle.html; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3800752/Modern-day-hermit-watches-tears-woodland-mud-hut-spent-four-years-building-finally-ripped-down.html; http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-37438541

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London solitary’s hut

From the Daily Mail: Albert Pike lost his job and suffered a nervous breakdown, becoming homeless. But through his ingenuity, the 28-year old has constructed a makeshift shelter in a north London wood, gradually enhancing the hut’s amenities to include running water, solar panels, and vegetable garden. A trust that claims ownership of the property has announced that he must vacate. This is a not unfamiliar drama for involuntary solitaries and shows the vulnerability of not only society but members who cannot psychologically transition back to the world — or get to the point where they don’t want to anymore. Albert Pike himself notes:

Through being spiritual, positive and adapting to the changes in life I have managed to get through these hard times and become a better person. … No one knows I’m here. I am so proud of what I have achieved and feel so lucky to call this place home.

URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3498326/Hermit-lives-hobbit-house-mud-hut-foraged-materials-including-mattress-dried-leaves-bath-driftwood-ordered-leave-home.html

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3498326/Hermit-lives-hobbit-house-mud-hut-foraged-materials-including-mattress-dried-leaves-bath-driftwood-ordered-leave-home.html#ixzz4CGkjfdcI
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Julia Holloway: hermit’s active life

The newspaper Catholic Philly reports on Julia Bolton Holloway, 78, a Catholic, a Dante scholar with a doctorate in medieval studies, and a resident of Florence, Italy. She works as a groundskeeper in a cemetery — and assists Roma (gypsy) families in seeking social assistance and especially in offering them English language instuction. She calls herself an “urban hermit” who is “freelancing” the religious life in her contemplative solitude, while pursuing a busy life.

Holloway, who is a writer, carpenter, seamstress, cultural critic, religious website designer and great-grandmother, said the eremitical life enables her to focus on her many projects. One of those is lobbying local authorities and international courts to allow Roma families to work and retain custody of their children, who are often taken from them by Italian social services.

Holloway was particularly influenced by the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, who combined an active life with reflective eremitism.

“The eremitical life is an excellent mode of life to be a writer, because what you do is you reduce all the false stimuli. There’s no television, you’re just not interested in consumerism,” she explained.

“With writing you transcend time. It’s a conversation you have listening to (Sts.) Augustine and Monica. … You arrive at that silence, which is the like the silence of a Quaker meeting, where the Spirit speaks,” she said.

Being a hermit is a liberating lifestyle, Holloway said.

“If you are doing it from the spiritual base, from the base of prayer and contemplation, somehow it takes off, it has its own energy,” she said, “it doesn’t come from me.”

URL: http://catholicphilly.com/2015/11/news/world-news/freelancing-the-religious-life-an-urban-hermit-tells-her-story/

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Agafia Lykov film

British film director Rebecca Marshall is producing a film about the Siberian hermit Agafia Lykov, whose life and circumstances are familiar to readers of this blog. A Guardian article titled “Stalin, Siberia and salt: Russian recluse’s life story made into film” summarizes Agafia’s life and indicates details about the film:

When British film director Rebecca Marshall first heard about Lykova’s life, she was gripped. “For two years I couldn’t stop thinking about this incredible woman surviving alone in the Siberian wilderness. It seemed like both a paradise away from our world of mass communication, and a nightmare of loneliness.”

She said the reality of Lykova’s circumstances had surprised her. “When I finally met Agafia, what surprised me was that rather than feeling like a primitive situation, it felt like arriving in the future – to a world with no technology, the vast forest littered with discarded space junk. It is an incredible and beautiful place.”

The documentary, The Forest in Me, is intended as “a meditation on the nature of individual human identity”, she says.

Marshall, along with the director of photography, Sarah Cunningham, and Ukrainian-born assistant director, Elena Andreicheva, raised more than £14,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to get the project off the ground and received funding from Creative Europe.

URL: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/12/russia-recluse-siberia-stalin-agafia-lykova-documentary; http://rbth.com/politics_and_society/society/2015/11/03/uk_film_to_profile_wilderness_woman_in_Siberia_536845
Film trailer: http://rebeccaemarshall.com/the-forest-in-me/

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Rachel Denton, UK hermit, update

Rachel Denton, mentioned in entries here in 2009 and 2013, is a Catholic hermit, formerly a teacher and once a Carmelite nun.A canonical hermit, she lives alone in Lincolnshire, now complicated by cancer. Several media profiles (Independent, Daily Mail) describe her use of social media, supplementing a modest income from calligraphy. Referring to her health, the 52-year-old Rachel says “It was interesting when I got cancer because you make a bucket list and my bucket list was to spend my life as a hermit.”

URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3269366/I-hermit-m-human-Reclusive-former-nun-says-social-media-internet-shopping-make-shunning-human-contact-easy.html#ixzz3sEBSBTDb;
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/tech/meet-the-52-year-old-modern-hermit-whos-living-in-solitude-with-twitter-facebook-keeping-her-company-1151297.html;
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/sister-rachel-denton-why-i-founded-a-one-nun-hermitage-a6706916.html; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2015/11/16/inside-the-life-of-a-modern-day-hermit/