Graham and Kristina Holdaway are the owners of Carmyllie.

We run Carmyllie with the regular help of WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) and the more occasional assistance of our adult children and their growing families.

Graham’s ancestors have, without exception, been farmers - for as far back as he has been able to trace.  His own journey has involved city work as an accountant, consultant and company director.  For Graham, his forestry and farming activity has been and is a source of deep satisfaction and relaxation.  Kristina’s family also had rural interests.  She worked as a nurse and carried more than her share of the load of raising four children.

We believe deeply in the importance of the places we inhabit and our obligation to care for those places.  The great American cultural critic Wendell Berry said in a poem:

                                                                          Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.

These words resonate with our own family farming roots.  Our ancestors were serious, thoughtful people who tended their farms in the belief that they were doing God’s work.  Men like Len, Lester, Barry and Alan Holdaway, Harold, Bob, John and Richard Spark, and Carl and Doug Irving.  But, more even than them, at Carmyllie we hear the gentle footsteps and feel the loving presence of Margaret Spark, Mary and Miriam Holdaway, Cath Irving and Alison Hodson – women who were partners in the farming enterprise in the fullest and best sense.

In the end we believe that productivity (measured broadly enough) is the best measuring stick.  We aim to have Carmyllie produce as much fibre, food and soul nurture as we can manage – while building and preserving its capacity to do so far out into the future.