A 58-year-old mother of three, Emma Orbach has spent the past 13 years living with no electricity in her-built roundhouse, at the bottom of a field in rural West Wales, at 15-minutes walk from the nearest road.
    Her daily routine includes tending to her vegetable plot and collecting fruit, looking after her three goats, seven chickens and two horses and cutting firewood. She gets her drinking water from a nearby stream and only rarely goes to the shops for treats like rice and chocolate. Her evenings are spent in the light of her stove, cooking her dinner and playing music. She then retires to her wool covers at about 7:30 pm. Mrs. Orbach said: "This is how I want to live. This lifestyle makes me feel really happy and at peace and this is my ideal home."
    Living in the mountains of West Wales, she named her home Tir Ysbrydol, which means "spirit land" in Welsh. When her children, who are in their 20s and 30s and live in London, Bristol, and Brighton, visit, they, like all guests at the round house, are banned from bringing technology such as phones or laptops with them.
    It is all a far cry from the conventional trappings of Mrs. Orbach's background. Her father was a violinist and her mother was a librarian. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in Chinese, she married architectural historian Julian Orbach. Together they founded the Brithdir Mawr eco-community in the Preseli Mountain near Newport, in Pembrokeshire, round a 180-acre farm in 1993. For five years they enjoyed a simple life, then a survey plane chanced the "lost tribe" and they were involved into a decade-long battle with the authority.
    Officer were unable to find any record, let alone planning permission, for the mystery hillside village surrounded by trees and bushes and insisted the eight grass-cover buildings should be pulled down.
    The eco-community suffered a decade of inquires, court cases and a planning hearing before their fight, backed by more modern support for green issues, finally ended in victory in 2008 when the roundhouses were given planning approval.
    But by then Mr. and Mrs. Orbach had divorced and the community split into three sections, including hers. Each community is independent and they co-exit as neighbours in a more traditional style.
    Explaining why she set up her own home just before 2000. Mrs. Orbach said she felt a very strong pull to live the life even more simply.
    She is in the process of building a sixth roundhouse there and has the permission from the council to build four more. She runs a "healing and retreat centre" on the site and usually has about 5 people living in the other roundhouses. They pay her a donation, which covers her ￡ 63-a-month council tax payment, repair cost and supplies of grains.
    She said: "I don't miss anything at all about what is normally called reality. The quality of life, in my view, is decreasing and everything is speed up and become more stressful. Once or twice I have joked about getting a takeaway pizza delivered here when I am tired after a long day. But I don't think anyone would deliver a pizza across two fields anyway."  Mrs. Orbach usually ______ at 7:30 pm.