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Within an hour of arriving in Botton, a small, picturesque village in the UK’s North York Moors, I was standing in a farm field shovelling hay.
Alongside me were my friend Max*, his father, a co-worker named Richard, two volunteers and several learning-disabled residents of the Esk Valley Camphill Community. We spent the next few hours on a conservation project, moving hay, stopping regularly to lean on our tools and talk, and at one point gathering on a picnic bench beside the cars for a tea and biscuit break.
Officially Richard was “providing care” and the learning-disabled residents of the community (often referred to as villagers) were “receiving care”, with volunteers helping the co-workers along the way. On the ground, though, I could already see that the structure of the community served to sideline this distinction rather than reinforce it.
I had driven to the moors expecting something resembling a care institution. This was something else. While I was there, I would observe two radically different interpretations of social care side by side.
