Practice your downward-facing dog, surrounded by goats!
Meet Farmer Dot McCarthy – a sheepdog-training, quad-biking, goat-keeping whirlwind who is transforming her family’s Lancashire hill farm into an alternative staycation, where she hosts weddings, treetop romantic getaways and goat yoga.
Dot’s tapped into the trend for quirky yoga classes, by opening up her barn at Cronshaw Fold Farm, in Helmshore and allowing yogis to perform their downward-facing dogs, surrounded by goats.
BBC1 viewers were allowed to sit in on one of the classes via a new observational fil which aired on the channel last night (November 11). The uplifting observational documentary, filmed over one summer in 2019, followed the adventures of Dot McCarthy as she tries to balance a burgeoning green holiday destination with the demands of a busy working farm.
During the half an hour documentary, Dot said she is concerned about the effects climate change is having on the farm and local wildlife as well as the rest of the world.
As a result, she’s now on a fundraising mission to buy renewable power technology (solar panels, heat pumps, wind turbines etc) so the farm can do its bit to tackle climate change and is offering goat yoga in a bid to raise some extra funds.
She wants to produce more renewable energy than the farm needs in order to sell the extra back to the grid for other people to use. This will help bring down the cost of buying renewable power for other people who don’t have the space to install green tech in their own home.
Dot said she is planning on transitioning away from her current style of livestock farming so goat yoga may well be a short-lived addition to our offering at the farm. Click here for more information.