FIRST PERSON: Yurt campsite owner Amanda Copp

“I HAD dreamt of running my own campsite since I was 21, but it wasn’t until I was 44 that I realised my dream and founded a yurt campsite with my husband Peter, 62.

Eleven years ago we were looking to move and buy eight acres of land. Peter saw the farm and thought it was lovely. We found ourselves buying 80 acres of land and a bungalow in Llanishen.

The first year we were there was the most phenomenal year. It was gorgeous from start to finish and we thought it was heaven but we knew we had to make some money. We bumped into some people at a party who had a yurt campsite in Devon and they showed us around their English yurts.

That was in the August and we decided to buy our own yurts in the November after I found some real Mongolian ones on the internet. Because we were buying so many we bought them direct and ended up importing and selling them, which is what Peter still does.

Much to my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed the sales and marketing. As well as letting out the yurts for holiday-makers, we have also been running courses in setting up yurt campsites. I get a real buzz out of sharing our experiences with others who are looking for a life change.

I think it was worthwhile and nice to be a bit different. We had two for a year and now have five at Hidden Valley Yurts. Yurts were quite unheard of back then.

We have visitors from all over the world, including artists from Israel and a family from Delhi in India. We also have people travelling from Cardiff, Bristol, Bath and London to enjoy a glamping holiday. One visitor who won’t mind being mentioned is the Welsh tenor Wynne Evans who comes here with his family for a break each year.

I haven’t always lived in Llanishen. I was born in Cardiff but we moved to Dinas Powys when I was six and later lived in Penarth.

As a young girl I had a pony and was always interested in farming. I thought that was what I wanted to do.

On July 4, the day after I left school I started work on a dairy farm milking cows, with hopes of one day running my own farm.

I had a place at agricultural college and started a year’s practical experience. I would spend the week milking 70 cows and on the weekends help with milking 240 cows on my then boyfriends’ farm.

At 16 you just do things like that don’t you but I was only there a few months. I gave it up when my relationship ended and at 19 drifted into secretarial work. I then worked as a housing officer with a housing association and was the youngest housing officer in Wales covering the Valleys. I loved it and stayed there until I was pregnant with Sam, now 21.

I met Peter, who was a sail maker at the time and living in Chepstow, on a blind date. Sam was six weeks old at the time. We are both keen sailors and discovered we had been racing on the same boat the year before but were both in relationships.

My grandfather was a master boat builder and I have sailed since my 20s. I would often go racing off Barry with my uncle Howard in his boat Tinbobbin or my cousin for fun but I’m not very competent.

We were engaged six weeks later and got married in Penarth a year later before settling in Chepstow. We soon had Harry, now 19, and spent six years in St Briavels but I missed Wales.

After I had the boys and I enrolled on a women returners course and studied management. I had worked for years at a senior level but it was staggering how having children and not having a job saps your confidence. I went for a job interview and got through to the last two candidates but didn’t get it. I phoned them up to ask why and was told that it was because I didn’t have any legal experience. I was so miffed that I completed a two-year paralegal course on an absolute whim which I loved. I would definitely have loved a career in law if I had studied it earlier. I then got a part-time job in Wyedean School as an exam officer before running their appeals panel.

We then moved onto the farm and set up the business. Slowly but surely we built up the business and ‘glamping’ really took off.

Llanishen is a lovely place to live. There is a great sense of community in the village and we regularly host charity events in our cricket pavilion, complete with decking and duck races on the lake.

I was looking for a workshop to store the yurts when I came across a cricket pavilion in Somerset on an online auction site and fell in love with it.

It’s a traditional 45ft-long wooden pavilion with a veranda that was being sold by a club that was going to build a new pavillion.

We had a low-loader to collect it but we had to physically take it apart and number all the planks so that we could put them back together.

The village helped us to put it up during our barn-raising parties, it was fantastic. We call it our party pad and hold charity do’s in there. Everyone from the village loves it and we’re so pleased we could save it from being scrapped. It’s such a special place.

We also keep alpacas. I had seen Llamas at Greenmeadow Farm in Cwmbran and said I would one day like one but friends of ours said they spit. We saw a smallholding magazine featuring alpacas and I thought that they looked so cute. As soon as we moved in my mum bought me four and Peter bought me some more. We now have over 20 that we breed, including Fudge one of my original Alpacas.

Our passion at the moment is restoring a little wooden folk boat called the Vanderkayla and getting her back in the water. She has an amazing history and sailed in the same transatlantic race as Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth IV.

I feel that life has gone full circle as I started working on a farm and here I am in the Wye Valley spending much of my time outdoors.

We have plans to moor the boat in South Devon and to do more sailing. We’re always involved in something. I am a wardrobe mistress in the annual village panto held and we also enter a team in the Rotary’s annual raft race on the River Wye at Monmouth.

After a lifetime as an employee I love running my own business and I wish the schools and colleges did more to encourage entrepreneurism in students.”