mark & Karen

March 2024
We are continuing to do housesits this year, it will be our third year on the site. We are going to ask the hosts if they can contribute towards travel to the agreed housesits, other than that no changes from us.
We have done some fantastic sits in Scotland, and look forward to more.
July 2023 update
We are in bonny Scotland this year, and what a stunning place it is. Below is a review from a lady whose croft we looked after for a month.

"What a lovely couple! Friendly, cheerful, polite, sensible, easy going, trustworthy and reliable, I had no qualms about leaving Mark and Karen in charge of my smallholding whilst I enjoyed a much needed break. As well as looking after livestock, they were happy to turn their hands to other tasks; potting up plants, fencing, fixing and cleaning. It was a pleasure to host Karen and Mark here at Adrian’s Croft for the month of June and I would be happy to host them again and recommend them both to others."

Hi there lovely people, we have worked for the last 25 years in mental health and education and the last 7 years running our own Community Mental Health project from a Kentish wooodland.
Mark is a trained counsellor and Karen is Forest School Practitioner.

We have a love of nature and the outdoors and have decided to take a massive leap of faith, leave our business behind and venture out into the wild with our rucksacks and tent exploring our beautiful country.

We will be walking around the whole of the UK wild camping. the occasional camp site mixed in with some house sitting and workaways.

We start our journey in Rye, East Sussex and plan to walk along the South West Coast towards Cornwall.

Mark has done a 2 month house sit in New Zealand looking after 2 dogs which was a great experience. Karen has had cats and dogs for the last 15 years so are well accustomed to the needs of animals.

We are both very creative, love the outdoors, meeting new people and leading a simple life.
As we are new to this, so have very little feedback, we thought we would put some feedback on here from a couple of workaways we have done, where we have gone and lived with someone for a time and helped them around their homes.

WOW, we have had some amazing workawayers who have become friends. Mark and Karen have quite simply been the best. They brought knowledge, skills and most importantly beautiful personalities and souls with kind hearts and bags of enthusiasm. There was not anything that they were not willing to try and everything they embarked on they achieved and excelled. They were more than willing to learn new skills and help us to research methods. We learnt so much from them as well. They integrated with all of the people staying and visiting us from all walks of life with absolute ease. We could not recommend them highly enough and really hope they will come back again and stay lifelong friends.

Karen and Mark stayed with us for twelve days in June 2022. They were really good about communicating clearly before they arrived, and were very respectful of our house and our space. Mark transformed one of our very cluttered sheds and showed imagination in using materials at hand to construct a workbench and a compost bin. Karen helped with a wide variety of jobs in the garden including weeding paths and pruning rhododendrons, she also enjoyed being creative and making some decorative signs for the garden with found objects. They were both interested in learning more about making compost and improving the soil, and we made a hot compost pile together. Karen and Mark both made a delicious supper for us all to share. It was very interesting to hear about their walk so far, and their plans for the future and we wish them the best of luck.