“There was this tiny ad in the Cape Argus that said ‘14 hectares – fynbos, dam, poplar forest, river’. Baz saw it while he was sitting at the airport on his way to skipper a yacht in Europe and he suggested I go and have a look.”

Lots of people dream about getting out of the city, finding a different pace, living a simpler life. People who imagine keeping chickens, growing their own food, getting off the grid. And then there are people who actually do it. Cathy Marriot and Basil Stilwell are those people.

Cathy was 37 and eight months pregnant with twins when she saw Sondagskloof for the first time in 1999. “When I saw it, I thought: this is my land,” she says. “We had been looking to get out of the city, but when I told Basil, he thought I was crazy.”

The farm was Sondagskloof, in the Sandies Glen valley in the Overberg, about 20 km from Stanford and 40 km from Hermanus, where Cathy grew up, but this felt too far from the sea for Basil. He started his career as a professional diver on offshore oil rigs, worked his way up and is now marine terminal manager in Sudan. His career, though lucrative, has meant long periods away from his family. In fact, he is stuck in Sudan when we get to the farm. He FaceTimes his daughters from his hotel room, looking dejected as he hasn’t been able to get a flight home due to the political situation. He’s been away for three months.

“I said to Basil, either you buy this land with me, or I am going to buy it with Alwyn,” says Cathy. That seemed to work.

Alwyn van Wyk is an architect and mutual friend, who ultimately helped design the family’s beautiful straw-bale farmhouse. “He was always part of the journey,” Cathy says fondly.

Shortly after buying the farm, the couple’s