Rural Smallholdings Magazine

Chris and Suzie Bailey had jet-setting jobs, travelling the world to help out struggling companies. But in their forties the couple decided to opt for a simpler life, and nine years ago moved onto a smallholding in South-West Scotland.

They now keep rare breed pigs, local sheep varieties and chickens, and offer bed & breakfast in their stone-built cottage, originally the butler’s house for a nearby stately home.

As B&B owners, they are one of the thousands of small guest operations which together are over a third of the size of the entire British hotel sector. The tourism business generates more foreign income for the British economy than big names like North Sea oil, and £1.7 billion is spent a year just by UK residents visiting B&Bs – without even starting to count visitors from overseas. But each bed and breakfast operation is as individual as the people running it, and B&B owners’ online forums features tales ranging from the pains of broken crockery and drunken visitors to the joys of guests and hosts who bond over deceased pets or sharing flower seeds.

“In our case, we mainly started the B&B because we’re in a very, very rural area and my wife’s very sociable,” says Chris Bailey. “To be honest, I’d be happy enough if I hardly ever saw another person, but she likes company and it’s a great way to see new people.”

Guests at Whithorn Lodge are often fed on homegrown produce from the smallholding itself – as Chris Bailey puts it, “If in the summer they have eggs, bacon, sausage and tomato the whole lot comes from here.”

As well as feeding the guests, the Baileys find that their rare breed animals attract much of their custom. “Most people come here because they see the website and that we have pigs and sheep and sometimes we have a calf,” says Chris. “People come to see the lambs in the spring or ring up especially to see if we have piglets, because they’re used to people so they’ll run up to you and children love stroking them. And a lot of the locals from neighbouring farms and small holdings tell their friends and family and sometimes if friends and relatives come to visit they’ll stay with us if their families can’t house them all.”

Running a bed & breakfast, Bailey asserts, will never make the couple rich. But it does make running a working smallholding with far more animals than they ever planned a more viable activity. And, as Chris Bailey points out, because they only hire out one room they aren’t overburdened with red tape. “If you don’t have more than three rooms and you have the health and safety basics, like smoke alarms, the authorities don’t bother you. It’s only if you’re running a guest house, with more than three rooms, a much more professional operation, that it starts to be treated like a bigger business.”

“The quality of life doing this isn’t even comparable to what we did before,” continues Chris Bailey. “It’s wonderful.”

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Article by Sarah Irving for Rural Smallholdings Magazine