Hi, I’m Kate Hill.

A storyteller begins with observing and noting the flow of life in those around her. My own story began buried in books—mythology, fairy tales, and adventurers—the one constant in a childhood disrupted by moving and resettling for short but intensive periods. While I carried this relentless movement well into the middle of my adult life, I eventually put down tentative roots among an unfamiliar language, culture, and the gentle landscape of Southwest France.

In the first half of my life, a long and adventurous life of travel by land and sea, camping across continents in beat up old trucks and inland on antique canal barges, I gathered the tools and stories that would feed a more settled life later. I learned to cook and feed small groups of travellers across the Sahara, around a campfire, or in the cockpit of a small tippy sailing boat. In the second half of my seven decades as I stayed in Gascony, I would teach culinary professionals those skills I learned while writing about French cooking, butchery, and charcuterie. I have written articles, produced television shows, and published a handful of books as well as teaching hundreds of students.

Now, having planted myself so deep in the deep fertile Gascon soil I am embedded like a stone, in 2023 I opened the doors of my farmhouse to other writers and artists as founder of the creative residency The Relais de Camont. And it is here that I write everyday creating the Almanac for Belonging on my Substack newsletter- The Camont Journals—read here.

While happenstance landed me here at Camont over 38 years ago, curiosity kept me returning and refusing to be dislodged through divorce, death, and old age. Now, a “modern elder”—a woman living solo among a quiet crowd of creative spirits—I am refocusing my life as a storyteller beyond the recipes and romanticised travel and into the depths of the everyday celebrations of life.