Can anyone help me identify this mid century 'rural memoir' book? (not Elizabeth West)

[TheBookShelf]

Can anyone help me identify this ‘rural memoir’ book? One I read in the 70s or 80s and would love to reread. I think it was set post WW2.

Woman (and I think also her husband? Or possibly her parents) move to smallholding /small farm/off grid type of life to a cottage in, I think, rural Wales or Scotland. Book is about their adventures in new lifestyle on very little money. I think set some time between about 1950 and 1970.

I have Elizabeth West’s Hovel in the Hills and all the sequels, and the several farming memoirs by Ruth Janette Ruck (A Place of Stones, etc) , and it’s definitely not any of those.

The one distinctive episode I remember is that the author makes herself a patchwork skirt, as she can’t afford to buy a new one.

Ideas welcome!

Can't help you I'm afraid, but I have EWs novel in the Hills, loved it, and also kitchen in the hills. Did she write some more books?

Yes, she also wrote Garden in the Hills (book 2 in the series) and Patch in the Forest (which was about their later life in the Forest of Dean). The latter is hard to find but pops up occasionally on ebay etc. She also wrote two books about her years as a school secretary after they left Wales. Suffer Little Children and Insufferable Little Children.

Is it A Croft in the Hills (1960) by Katharine Stewart

Thank you but no, not A Croft in the Hills, which I read recently.

There is this one specific episode I remember about the author making a patchwork skirt. Something also about very rainy weather (though that is part of the territory with this type of memoir!).

Thanks for that. I think I have garden in the hills, but I'll look out for the others.