Residency offers space and time for creation and reflection - an opportunity to completely immerse yourself in the rhythms of nature and the land.

Creatives from artists and writers to crafts people of all genres are invited to spend time away from the outside world walking the meadows, dabbling in the brook, and practicing forest bathing or ‘shinrin-yoku’ in the temperate rainforest valley. 

Artists-in-residence are accommodated in a shepherds hut and by arrangement can use the second hut as a small studio, we can also offer other creative spaces including our threshing barn and byre by prior arrangement. Our 30 acres of meadows, woods and stream are your open-air studio.  

We offer spaces for single artists to pairs of artists who work collaboratively.

Artist and writer Jackie Morris has stayed with us in one of our shepherds huts and has written of her time here Listening to the land; or, what we did on our holiday - Jackie Morris Artist 

Artist and writer Carrie Foulkes has written about her time at Cefnmachllys in the Dark Mountain journal - you can read her words in full here 

'I first came to Cefnmachllys in winter... I brought in a solitary and joyful new year at this rural 17th century farmstead overlooking the Bannau Brycheiniog, tending to the animals and wandering in the mountains. I would walk all afternoon in the drizzle, come back before dusk ... before building a fire in one of the woodburners in the old stone hearths. 

In the summer I return to the formerly rain-drenched fields to find them sun soaked, green and lush. Skylarks sing overhead in the long evening light. I plant baby hawthorn trees with my hosts, Sam and Helena, who have become my friends. 

One afternoon we walk through long grasses in a meadow adjacent to the farmhouse and conceal ourselves within a copse, near an earthen ridge housing an ancient badger sett. We wait in silence until the badgers emerge. A group of youngsters play. They tussle and tumble on the hillside. I imagine the vast network of underground tunnels and chambers stretching below us an invisible subterranean system, home to many generations, past, present and future.

That night, beneath a sky filled with stars, Sam and I don headlamps and boots and make our way to the stream to look for white-clawed crayfish. He often goes down to the water at night, seeking their lobster-like forms amongst the stones and pebbles. They are an important keystone species, Sam says. They bring otters up the river. Their presence is reassuring, a demonstration of the river's health. Their absence is ominous, a sign of agricultural pollution and ecological disruption...'

We are blessed to have welcomed artists, writers and thinkers to Cefnmachllys including Jackie Morris, Simon Dorrell, Pete Monaghan, Maggie Brown and Carrie Foulkes. We were an early home for artist blacksmith Jack Waygood and ceramicist Gayle Ansell.