Imagine living in a few acres of Somerset woodland. Just outside your front door, wild flowers carpet the forest floor, birds sing in the trees, dappled sunlight shines through the leaves. There are raised beds where you grow your own food, keep pigs and chickens, do simple woodwork …

Sounds like the good life, right? But now add this to the picture: you share your beautiful home with an endless stream of guests including Hayley, a recovering addict whose feet smell so putrid it’s impossible to eat in the same room as her; Ben, a chap with learning difficulties who spends his spare time enjoying sadistic porn magazines; Chloe, a teenager with anorexia who self-harms and has such severe OCD that she has memorised every stock number in the Ikea catalogue; and Darren, a former soldier who is so traumatised that he has a panic attack when somebody pops a balloon.

If it sounds a little less idyllic now, that was very much the point for Tobias Jones. Five years ago, he and his wife Francesca Lenzi bought four hectares (10 acres) of land and founded Windsor Hill Wood, a rural sanctuary for people going through crises. They intended to do quite the opposite of escaping to the countryside; they were not “retreating from the so-called ‘real world’, but engaging with it more deeply”. Inspired by communities such as Pilsdon, a longstanding working farm and refuge on the Dorset coast, they planned to open their doors to the most vulnerable in society and offer them an “antidote to the sadnesses and sorrows of modern life”. Guests would help manage the land, tend to the animals, cook and do woodwork, receiving support and companionship in return.

And what would the Joneses themselves get out of it? This was not a case, insists the author, of “nobly helping the needy”. Rather, they wanted to bring up their three young children in a non-judgmental, communal environment. Jones had previously written a book, Utopian Dreams, about communal living, and had noticed that the children who grew up in such settings were “remarkably mature, eloquent and unfazed by the most weird or eccentric arrival”. In contrast, he came to consider nuclear families “claustrophobic, frantic and defensive”. He felt the impulse parents have to try to insulate their children from the difficult aspects of our society – by moving to the “right” area, choosing the “best” school, and all the rest of it – is not only doomed to fail, it also leaves young people ill equipped when they are confronted with reality.

A Place of Refuge documents the progress of the project, from its chaotic beginnings – in a litter-filled former quarry with no legal structure, no experience and no rules – to a relatively established and effective enterprise. Jones is admirably candid about the difficulties: both he and Francesca suffer periods of near-breakdown, “compassion fatigue” is a constant threat, and they permanently hover on the brink of exhaustion. They worry about the children, particularly when one guest drops the baby on its head. Progress is often of the circular variety; while they see signs of healing in some of their guests, many others fall off the wagon, some rather spectacularly. Even the conservation work they do in the woodland is threatened by ash dieback. By the end, he admits that he has begun to see the attraction of the relative calm and intimacy of a traditional nuclear family.

So this is no Hollywood-style tale of redemption and transformation. It is something much more honest: a warts-and-all account of what it is like to try a radically different way of living, and to not only survive, but have real triumphs. Buildings are constructed, friendships are formed, conflicts resolved. Complete strangers offer their time, money and resources to support the project. As the community comes together, Jones notices that people are slowly changing: the addict who arrived with papery skin becomes “rural ruddy”; the heavily sedated bipolar teenager finds he is able to cook meals for everyone.

Even in the darkest moments, there are plenty of reasons to laugh. One visitor informs the couple that they should be on duty 24 hours a day, in case he “needs some cheese”; another recovering addict kindly saves Francesca a doughnut but can’t resist taking one neat bite out of it. Thanks to Jones’s sense of humour the book rarely feels “worthy”, in the pejorative sense, despite the subject matter. And while he is deeply knowledgable about communalism, he is reassuringly sceptical about the wackier fringes of alternative culture (Glastonbury is memorably described as “the only place I know where you’ll see a busker playing a dulcimer”).

The book raises some knotty questions about idealism. Many of us would agree with Jones’s diagnosis of the ills of society, but very few of us would pretty much single-handedly set about finding the cure. What kind of person do you have to be to do that? It requires courage, but also a healthy dose of self-belief. Those of us who trundle along with the status quo are inclined to be cynical about those who don’t, perhaps because they are an uncomfortable reminder of our own shortcomings.

Religion helps: Tobias and Francesca are Christians, and felt they were “summoned” to “turn the sermon on the Mount into a manifesto for life”. But Jones is rather coy about Christianity throughout the book – there is the odd reference to visiting their home-made chapel, and to a spiritual discipline, but he doesn’t go into much detail, presumably wary of alienating non-Christian readers. I would have liked to know more. I’ve always regarded the capacity for religious belief to propel people towards extraordinary acts of altruism as the strongest argument in its favour, and it seems a shame that he doesn’t articulate it more fully.

Jones acknowledges that there was “probably a fair bit of vanity and pride mixed in with the altruism … Perhaps I wanted to be a hero.” He is also keenly aware of the fine line between a supportive community and a cult, and worries about vulnerable guests idealising him. His answer is to implement a firm set of community rules, and to practice “spiritual emptying”. “Boundaries and expectations were respected because people realised this place wasn’t an ego trip … the rigour felt right because it wasn’t imposed by some man with a messiah complex.” Whether or not that is completely true is difficult to judge from his own account – one would need to hear the story from some of the guests’ point of view. I also wondered about his wife’s perspective: was she left holding the babies while their father heroically took on everyone else’s problems?

By the end, however, I had cast most of my doubts aside. Even if Jones is an egotist, he is an admirably erudite, charming and reflective one. To read this book is to imagine, even if only briefly, that a different way of living might be possible. We all need to do that once in a while.

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