Musician and builder Rohan Black, 27, lives in a converted train carriage on a field in Somerset. He talked to me about the importance of company, the difficulties of doing your own plumbing and recording music on solar-powered gear.

It’s worth mentioning that the summer is easy. And the winter is hard. That’s a basic rule of living out on the land. On a typical summer’s day I wake up with the sunlight coming in, birds singing and the smell of nature, and prepare some food, maybe work on some practical things that need doing, building something or digging or chopping. I have a gas burner, you can cook on the wood burner but you wouldn’t light the fire in the morning unless is it a freezing, freezing winters day. So you make tea and boil a kettle on the gas, it’s just easier really. But if you wanted to go fully off-grid you have to figure out something else, people use rocket stoves – they’re quite good.

Tending to my plants, watering the plants and sitting looking out the window, playing my music in the summer. Ahh, it sounds nice doesn’t it? If I’m lucky I have some visitors and we have a barbecue or something. That’s another nice thing about the field, you can have nice outdoors picnics and just hang out outside, it’s a massive garden basically.

So it’s a Victorian railway carriage, its about 30ft long, originally brought back to the field by my Dad who’s also into antiques and old things. It’s a nice little field, about 2 acres with some fruit trees and a couple of sheds. Not too many neighbours but there is one house nearby. The carriage has got a little kitchen area and a wood burner and a bed. It’s pretty basic, pretty rustic but that’s all you really need. There’s a toilet outside and there’s a deck along the front, which is lovely to sit out on in the summer.

I’ve been living here two and a half years. The carriage was actually being used to keep chickens. It belonged to my Dad’s friend who is also a bit of an antiques nutter and yeah, he was keeping chickens in it. I think he sold it to my Dad for less than a thousand pounds. He got a lorry to pull it to the field – its on a giant metal axel. I remember when he got it; he fixed it all up, cleared out all the chicken shit and put in a nice wooden floor.

We’ve had to put in a permission for permanent residence – they can’t kick you off if you can prove you’ve lived somewhere for 4 years. I’ve had to send them a statement saying when I lived there and that I’ve been living there from 2011. But the railway carriage isn’t a permanent structure, its on wheels. We’re just waiting, there’s a 20-day period and then they’ll let us know what’s going on.

We’re hoping that they’ll say that because we’ve been living there for four years we have permission to be there. Then there’s a separate thing of putting a planning application in afterwards – it would just be retrospective permission for the structures we’ve got there – but if they say we can then that’s great.

It’s a great life, there’s no rent and you get freedom and its actually lovely living in a field, being out in nature. I started living like this because my Dad was doing it so I was in a position where I could see that it could be done. I think a lot of people are unaware of it because it’s not an accepted thing to do so much. But I come from a line of people who think its fine and are happy to do that so it was an option for me and I thought it was a good option – no rent and my own place. I think these days, young people can’t afford to buy houses, so living in a field is an obvious thing to do if you can. I hope it gets more popular, I hope they relax the laws a bit.

The pros have gotta be peace and quiet, beautiful nature, independence. There’s a nice comfort being in a place on a field, it feels like some older way of living. You imagine people used to live a bit more like that, on the long dark nights you don’t necessarily spend all your time watching TV with the lights on. You might have some candles or something or a 12v light but it’s a much more organic way of living I suppose. You can grow your owns stuff as well, that’s a pro.

But then yeah cons, there are quite a lot of cons, ill just list them off. Toilet… its hard to work to make facilities. You know. In a house you get your plumber in and everything’s kinda done for you. But here, unless you’re loaded and you can afford to have someone build you a hot water system or whatever, you have to do the whole thing yourself and some things are quite complicated and quite hard to figure out, like plumbing. Plumbing is a good example because it’s probably the most – getting a water heating system – is probably the most advanced or complicated thing you can do. Although people do, people do all kinds of interesting and innovative things when it comes to self-build houses and off-grid living. So yeah, lots of hard work.

Chopping up wood in the winter. You have to chop up wood every day. Unless you do a marathon session with will last you a week or maybe a couple of weeks. So there’s lots of hard work involved. Making the fire, that’s work. Cold mornings, definitely a con. Although my Dad said it doesn’t really bother him, I think you get used to it. And then there’s the legal thing. The feeling that I could possibly get kicked off because of the law. It’s a bit precarious feeling. It would be much nicer to feel allowed to be there.

I’ve got a solar panel which is attached to a charge controller and a battery and an inverter which makes 240v electricity running a stereo and microphones and the laptop off of that. In the summer that’s really good. But in the winter you don’t get much out of the solar panel. That’s why you need a wind turbine as well but its a bit more complicated if you want to get a wind turbine, I don’t have one. They’re dangerous as well because you have to put them up high and make sure they’re not going to fly off.

The radio is essential. It can be a bit isolated. You get your nice peace and quite but yeah, you spend a lot of time on your own out on the land. I think the trick is to have lots of friends who want to come and be on the land as well. That’s the best way of combating the loneliness or obviously if you had a partner and you wanted to do it together, then it wouldn’t be lonely. But yeah, you know, its not too bad but in the winter sometimes it can get very isolated out there. But when you’ve got the fire on and a book or the radio its not so bad, its pretty sweet.

Pooping is a compost toilet, its very straightforward; you just put sawdust on it. There’s a tiny little toilet shed. Its quite harmless really, people are a bit squeamish about it but its actually quite nice, you get to be outside while you poo. Which is quite nice.

Showering is not such an advanced system. I mean in the summer you can have a cold shower with rainwater that’s been collected. Or I had a thing rigged up where I would boil the kettle and mix that with some cold water to get the right temperature and then chuck it in a big pot which had plumbing collecting to an actual shower head. then I’d quickly run around to the shower – you get about four minutes of warm water falling on you.

But in the winter I just go to friend’s houses for showers. You get a bit conservative with the showers, I mean once a week is not too bad.