A Shared Table | Our New Film

In Wales, in honour of our roots and in celebration of our season concept, A Shared Table, we meet a community of foragers, growers and cooks. Our story includes coastal forager Craig Evans; Michelle Evans, owner of field-to-fork restaurant Paternoster Farm; and representatives from Glasbren, a non-profit social enterprise reimagining our local food system. Each is united by a shared commitment to seasonality, provenance and place.

"Some people say its shape on the map resembles a wizard’s hat," says farmer Abel Pearson, of the Three Rivers Estuary in South Wales, “which is fitting, given it is the birthplace of Myrddin, or Merlin as he is better known.” It is in this distinctive patch of coastal Carmarthenshire that Abel works, at Glasbren, a community interest farm overlooking the sea, where the “ribbons and threads” of the Taf, Tywi and Gwendraeth rivers meet to tumultuous effect. “There are countless shipwrecks out there,” Abel adds, as though bewitched by nature’s power over the landscape, dwarfing human efforts to understand or contain it.

Tenant farmers over many generations have tuned into the rhythms of this piece of land, which is owned by the National Trust. In 2023, Abel and the Glasbren team took over from two brothers who had farmed it for 51 years. “They told me that sometimes there’s a rumbling sound,” he says, “‘the Boiling Pool of the Sea’, they called it.” The sound was a sign that a storm would come in six days’ time, they thought, and Abel tells me that it was how they planned their hay-cutting. “I love that,” he goes on, of his predecessors’ intuitive understanding of the place; “everything we do here is underpinned by the question of how we get back into a relationship with the land, with farms.”

Glasbren is a community supported agriculture (CSA) scheme with some 150 volunteers, and is named for the Welsh word for ‘sapling’, in homage not only to the youth of the project, but to the idea that, like a tree, the farm is part of a broader system. “We practice permaculture,” he says, “which is a lens on the world and how to live in it. We think about Earth care, people care and fair share, and work together to produce food in a way that’s regenerative, accessible and good for us in every sense.” This year, the Glasbren volunteers are planting a nut orchard (walnuts, sweet chestnuts, cobnuts), adding to their year-round roster of seasonal produce; they also keep goats for milking and Longhorn cattle intended for beef, but which also have a bonus regenerative function: their horns pull down tree fodder and their hooves make disturbances in the soil, promoting diversity of plant and insect life.

Coastal forager Craig Evans grew up on the slopes of the Black Mountains, just seven miles from where he lives now. It’s a corner of the country which, he says, “has it all – high mountains, gold mines, sandy beaches, rocky headlands, muddy sand, sandy mud, deep valleys and plenty of shelter.” He remembers foraging for fun as a boy – for Carmarthenshire’s famous cockles, mussels, sometimes even lobsters, also plants like sea spinach and laver – and credits those days with his enduring fascination with sea life. He describes being young, barefoot and searching for whatever was tickling his feet in the shallows on the shore; the answer: tiny shrimps. His curiosity grew from there, and he’s kept searching.

In a former life, Craig worked in banking, but left the business burnt out and searching for something else. As is often the way, he returned to his early interests – the land and sea of South Wales, and questions of how modern human life can live most harmoniously with them. He bought a 40 acre woodland in which most of the native trees – oak, beech, ash – had been removed, and replanted it with 28,000 of them, “my gift to the future,” he says. He sold the woods off in three plots to local environmentalists and began to make to make a job out of the thing he did anyway, ambling along the coastline with his razor clam-loving dog, Llew, and imparting an understanding of how to forage sustainably to locals and visitors alike. “You can coastal forage all year round,” he says, “and there’s always something you can eat. But we never take too much.”

Using a makeshift burner called a Swedish torch (which Craig has rebranded a ‘Solva Stove’ after a village up the road), he makes whatever he has found on his excursions into a meal. His favourite thing is a stir fry made with pepper dulse, otherwise known as sea truffle, with its rich umami flavour, alongside red seaweed which, he says, tastes a bit like prawns. Also unsalted Carmarthen butter, garlic, rock samphire and shellfish. The result is a briny, herbaceous medley of sea flavours garnished with gorse flowers and a bright red fungus called scarlet elf cups.

Michelle Evan’s cooking is more formal, although she certainly doesn’t see it that way. A former divorce lawyer, her grandparents were tenant farmers near where she, her husband Leum and their two daughters now live at Paternoster in Pembrokeshire, a move they made to get back to the land and follow a dream to work with food. “I haven’t had any formal training,” says Michelle, “and my food isn’t any one thing. It’s just simple cooking with a bit of a European slant, using good local ingredients.” That means lots of seafood – cockles, of course, and crab, which she says is on the menu a lot – also meat they’ve reared and Welsh cheeses wherever possible.

It’s a family affair. Michelle takes the lead in the kitchen, but her eldest daughter is with her for every service – “she makes the salads and cold starters, the sauces and our ricotta”, meanwhile Leum is her “number one veg prepper” and seven year old Connie is often cheekily working the floor. Paternoster hosts two dinner services a week, on Fridays and Saturdays, and all guests are fed a set menu, “to avoid waste, more than anything – but I cook what I want to cook, not what people want to order. They have to trust.” This chimes with Abel’s approach to his community veg box scheme. Choice (or having much of it) is a modern phenomenon when it comes to food, to the ingredients we cook with and eat, “we invite them to surrender to the Welsh landscape and what it can produce,” he says. Removing that choice can be revelatory for people, encouraging them to try something they might never have ordered at Paternoster. “Often the most delicious things are the least glamorous,” says Michelle, “Faggots, cawl, the brown crab meat, which I use for a butter we serve with focaccia.”

Craig, too, is governed by nature’s whims. “I can only go out at low tide,” he says, chuckling, “I’m a bit like a werewolf in that way: I’m governed by the moon.” To see a table groaning with seasonal Welsh ingredients – Craig’s foraged stir-fry, Michelle’s red and pink bitter leaf salad, and Abel’s chard – is to wonder why you would grow or gather, shop or cook any other way. Nature’s menu, sourced from within this singular, magical corner of Wales – around an estuary known as Merlin, no less – is full of goodness in every possible way.