The Ugly House in Capel Curig, Snowdonia, Wales.

There was a time when if you could build a house in a day and send smoke up the chimney, it would give you the right to throw an axe as far as you could from each corner of the house to claim the land as yours.

  
   
   
 
 


The history of the Ugly House (Ty Hyll) is very vague. A legend says it was built by two outlawed brothers. At the time there was a Welsh law called, tŷ un nos, meaning 'a house of a single night'. The law said that if you could build four walls between sunset and sunrise and have smoke coming out of the chimney, then you could claim the freehold of the land.
   
       

The amount of land depended on how strong you were. Standing at each corner of the house the builder would throw an axe as far as possible to determine how much land could be claimed. Looking at the size of the house there's no way it could have been built in a day, so perhaps something smaller was built on this site and then extended later. The old Welsh word 'hyll' in 'Ty Hyll' doesn't actually mean ugly, but something more like rugged. The house is now home to a tearoom with a honeybee centre upstairs. It is surrounded by five acres of ancient woodland and a wildlife garden tended by volunteers.

It may seem like the days when you could get free land are long gone, but there are still some places in the world where you can claim land as yours, and that's without having to build your home in a day of throw an axe. See Russia gives away first free land in Far East.