Letting go of control at Yeotown Devon in England
Pamela Goodman experiences a ‘Yeotox’ in Devon with her daughter and enjoys the spontaneity, dramatic coastal paths and delicious, plant-based food
There are multiple reasons why people go to Yeotown: to lose weight, to gain fitness, to detox, to destress, to change things up, to let things go, to restore balance, to sleep well, eat well and generally reboot. I guess my 23-year-old daughter Lucy and I could have ticked any number of these boxes (the pandemic has been particularly hard on those in their early 20s) and so, too, could the eight others with whom we shared our five-day retreat.
Most fellow Londoners took the train to North Devon; we, like a couple of others, went by car, flogging down the motorway, turning off near Tiverton Parkway, wriggling through the back streets of Barnstaple to a quiet country road and, some two miles on, the unassuming entrance into Yeotown – a misnomer if ever there was one for the apple orchards, gardens, fields and woodlands that surround the original stone farmhouse and its array of converted or cleverly constructed outbuildings picturesquely located in a rural river valley. Mercifully there’s no ‘town’ to it all.
Like all Yeotown retreats, ours began on a Wednesday lunchtime, gathered round a communal table with our fellow retreaters. So bad am I at anything communal – and I speak for my daughter here, too - I wince even to write this detail. But communal life is at the heart of a Yeotown retreat. There was that awkward moment when everyone is asked to introduce themselves. ‘Hi, I’m Pamela, I’m from London and I’m suffering from middle age anxiety.’ ‘Hi, I’m Lucy, I’m from London and my life has been bulldozed by Covid,’ or words to that effect.
“I loved that I drove away on the following Sunday afternoon feeling renewed and invigorated. If my mind felt healthier, so did my gut, and the muscles in my body felt lean and stretched and purposeful”
We’d joked about this scenario on our car journey as we’d downed the cappuccinos we definitely weren’t supposed to be drinking. We were anxious, deeply anxious, about getting up close and personal with a bunch of total strangers.
But it didn’t happen like that. First names only (even by the end we barely knew anyone’s surname) and absolutely no revelations about why we had all come to Yeotown. As the days progressed, barriers, of course, fell away but conversation revolved round our daily shared experiences and the boundaries of privacy remained intact.
Who knows if we were luckier than any other random bunch? Perhaps Yeotown always attracts like-minded folk who get on with each other. But we felt blessed by our group. We were seven women and three men, aged roughly between early twenties and mid-fifties, and all fairly comparable in terms of fitness and agility. We walked, on the whole, as a group (sometimes groups are split according to speed); we cycled as more of a straggle; and we were divided in yoga, according to experience. We ate together as a group at breakfast and lunch; supper – always early – was staggered according to the timetable of massages and therapies.
And so to the food. This to me was perhaps the most interesting and inspirational aspect of Yeotown. The omission of seven food groups (meat, gluten, refined sugar, alcohol, caffeine, dairy and wheat) was no real hardship – except for the caffeine and the headache that followed. I certainly never went hungry and neither, I believe, did the others (even the men, who were given identical portion sizes).
Who’d have thought that quinoa, millet and buckwheat could taste so good, that the humble cauliflower could be the star turn of a dish, that seeds and spices could be so nuanced, and that coconut and cashew could be the basis of or substitute for so many everyday meals? A plant-based diet of such sophistication is no easy skill to replicate but for five days our palates were truly tickled.
I have purposefully omitted a detailed account of each day as it unfolded. The programme is part of Yeotown’s secret and, in many ways, part of the cure. Without knowing what to expect comes a sense of letting go – hard for those of us who like to control every minute of every day. And with surprise comes spontaneity - a release of expectation and a requirement to live only in the present without dwelling on the past or fearing the future.
So let me instead make passing reference to things that I loved the most about this retreat. The walks, first and foremost, were magnificent – those high, dramatic coastal paths of North Devon bathed in unexpectedly benign autumn sunshine. I loved the picnic on a crazy boulder in the Valley of Rocks with the ocean stretching to a turquoise smudge of sea and sky.
I loved the gentle cooing of the doves that punctuated our early morning yoga sessions; I loved the Shiatsu massage with Amanda who told me things about myself I never knew; I loved my stolen swims; I loved the two little tears that rolled down my cheeks during the songs Mercedes played in our yoga wind-down; I loved our beautiful room with its fireplace, its swing chair and its guardian Buddha; I loved falling into bed, guilt-free and dog-tired each night at 9.30pm; I loved leaving with a suitcase of freshly-washed clothes; I loved that I had my gorgeous daughter with me and that our mother and daughter vibe felt so perfectly right.
And, I suppose most important of all, I loved that I drove away on the following Sunday afternoon feeling renewed and invigorated. If my mind felt healthier, so did my gut, and the muscles in my body felt lean and stretched and purposeful.
Should I be ashamed to admit that I’m now back on coffee, wheat and gluten? Should I beat myself up that I’ve had the odd glass of wine and the occasional square of chocolate? No. I reason life is too short to be perfect all of the time and without a few sins to rectify I might never find the excuse to wend my way back down those Devon lanes.
