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‘That day something magical happened to me,’ confesses Hywel Jones folding his sun-burnt arms across his chest, as surprised as I am by the emotion in his voice. ‘I was working in the woods near Llandeilo when I came upon a clearing and the most gorgeous white tipis. Inside the candles were lit, a young hippie was reading a book, someone trotted by on a pony. I thought, how brilliant to live in a tipi. I couldn’t forget it in all these years.’

Hywel’s family have been sheep farmers for generations. As a young man, he was too busy raising lambs and children to blow his mind at Glastonbury or chill out in Goa. He never wore a kaftan or lit a stick of incense. Now in his late fifties, with neat silver hair, a warm Welsh accent and a quad bike, the alternative way of life would seem not to have touched him. Yet hidden on his land in the Cledan valley, beside a babbling brook and protected by the embrace of high hills, he and his family find themselves replaying the Sixties vibe.

In the Sixties people believed in a better world. A small core of a vocal generation set out to change society by changing itself, rejecting old unfeeling ways, questioning established practices and searching for new values. By the Seventies many young people were on the road in search of that better world, most of them along the Asia Overland hippie trail. Inspired by Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beatles, these intrepid pioneers headed to India to find adventure and enlightenment. In ashrams and communes they pleaded for the resurrection of the Western soul and reached for something older, more complete and serene, never doubting the reach of their grasp.

As the oil crisis and Thatcher economics began to unravel the liberal dream, many thousands returned home to integrate what they had learnt into their daily lives. The popularity of current concerns for the environment, healthy eating and alternative medicine dates directly from that optimistic decade, as does the fusion of ancient Indian spiritual tradition, such as yoga and meditation, with the Native American belief in - and respect for - the earth as a living entity. These alternative ideas were greeted with suspicion at the time, but today they have spawned cultural phenomena as diverse as World Music, holistic ayurvedic beauty products, Nevada’s Burning Man Project and Wales’ Tipi Valley, the hippie ‘eco-community’ which Hywel happened upon near Llandeilo.

Twelve years since that first encounter, and after three years of negotiations with local planners, Cledan Valley Tipis opened its tent flaps earlier this month. I drove there for the weekend with my wife Katrin and our four year old son Finn. In recent years many of us – out of concern for both the environment and the family budget - have felt the need for alternative, low-impact, UK holidays. As a result tipi and yurt encampments are springing up in many beautiful corners of Wales and the West Country, some built around yoga workshops or organic gardening weekends, others offering complementary Reiki therapy and tickets to the Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth.

Twenty minutes after tumbling out of the car, we are building a fire, grilling organic sausages and watching a red hawk circle on the breeze, hunting for its supper. Above us the pointed prism of the tipi is a taut white canvas, its wooden poles tipped with multi-coloured ribbons. Finn circles it again and again, whooping with delight, beside himself with excitement. As the shadows lengthen and horizons contract, we move inside to layer sheepskins on the futons, later falling asleep by candlelight in the snuggest beds in the country. Our night is absolutely silent, apart from the calls of a pair of owls. We wake to the trill of birdsong and the whisper of canvas warming in the morning sun. Over the fire we cook banana porridge and a Welsh fry-up. Our day revolves around leisurely meals, brisk hill walks and a busy hour chasing butterflies across the seven acre site.

Finn discovers that our tipi is big enough for him to ride his scooter around inside. It is the largest of five, each of which is carefully sited on a broad wedge of wooded land. They range in size from the vast 28 footer to an intimate honeymoon love nest, its ribbons fluttering among the treetops in a secluded glade. Circular by design, they and their contents – the beds, the backrest seats, the sheepskin rugs, even the camping kitchen – are oriented around a central hearth, excluding no one. This inclusive, interior space deep in the natural world gives the visitor the sense of being both at home and on an adventure.

The Jones family - who live two miles away in Carno - are enthusiastically attentive to their guests’ needs, making daily deliveries of dry wood for the fire and ice packs for the cool box, sourcing a chopping board or colander, catering to wheelchair users, offering tourist information and conversation. On our last evening in this special place, Hywel tells me that the site is fed by its own natural spring, that the tipis are made less than twenty miles away, that the gravel for their bases was quarried on his brother’s farm. His son-in-law Jason adds, ’Our original aim was to be more mainstream, but we found ourselves naturally choosing local timber and solar panels for the wash house, building the benches and seats from windfall trees, becoming green almost by accident.’ He pauses to listen to the first cuckoo of the year. In a far clearing another guest practices Tai Chi movements while talking on his mobile phone. Alongside the looping, moss-banked brook the two mid-sized tipis are occupied by a Midlands family celebrating a sixtieth birthday. ‘I call our attitude “eco-gentle”. We’re not on a soapbox, telling people how to live their lives. Our guests simply arrive and have a green holiday, without producing aircraft carbon emissions, without using mains electricity, without realising it.’

In the village below is the Aleppo Merchant Inn, named after Llangollen-born John Matthews who traded silks and spices for the Mercer’s Company in Aleppo in the early 17th century. Now in modern day Syria, Aleppo is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, a camel’s trot from the western terminus of the Silk Road, the Asia overland route that the hippies commandeered as their trail to India. In the ancient world this was a key point where east met west, where Chinese lacquer work and ceramics, Indian spices and philosophy were first exchanged for European wool, gold and ideas, where Arab once sat with Jew and Christian. In the Sixties a generation in flares and open-toe sandals set out along the same road to find a kinder, gentler world. Today many of their ideals – most notably the responsibility of living in a sustainable manner - have entered the general consciousness and are symbolised in the quiet white tipis located on this beautiful hill farm in an unspoilt Welsh valley.

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