Living in a yurt, at one with Mother Earth

GUÉRET. British Corner. I recently met some people who had lived in a yurt for several years. Yurts are amazing round tents and I did spend a couple of nights in a yurt during a holiday, a lovely, interesting experience. However, it is one thing to spend a few nights in a yurt but quite another to choose a yurt as your home.

Yurts originate from Mongolia and Turkey, used by nomadic groups, the Turkish word yurt means home and it is certainly a simple home. Yurts are portable and people would take their home with them as they tended their animals and moved on to pastures new. Mongolian yurts were often beautifully decorated with patterns that matched their Buddhist philosophy. They were originally made from animal skins but nowadays are more likely to be made of strong tent material.

Yurts can often be more affordable than a house and the yurt dwellers told me that the idea of being close to nature and more ecologically friendly was a big attraction, plus the easy maintenance and simple living. The closeness to nature, the smells, the sights, the sounds was almost like living outside, you felt at one with Mother Earth.

Living in a yurt is certainly a journey back to a simple life often with like-minded people, making use of composting toilets, solar panels and rainwater collection. Of course you need some land on which to erect your yurt and also the permission of the Mairie, most are quite open-minded by giving their authorization but some are refused. Perhaps it is because yurt owners are stepping off the conventional path of house living which some cannot understand or accept.

Yurt living doesn’t suit everyone of course but it is not new, people have been living in yurts for thousands of years, more than half the population of Mongolia live in yurts! Yurts stay warm in the winter, they are often well insulated and have a wood burning stove, and in summer with the door and windows open and sited in the shade of trees they stay cool.

Yurt living also offers time for a family to spend together, with little overheads and little impact on the environment, living a little outside the system, maybe people here will not live in a yurt for ever but it works for many and maybe for many more in the future, who knows ?