When Charlotte Church arrives, she starts to cry. “I break down,” she says, “every time I reach here. It’s the first thing I do when I set foot on this soil.” It’s a two-hour drive from her home in Barry to The Dreaming, the retreat centre she opened in 2023, a pilgrimage across Bannau Brycheiniog and into the myth-steeped hills of the Elan Valley in Powys, central Wales. “Two to three weeks,” she’s explaining, icy ground crunching underfoot, “is the longest I can stay away before I start clucking. As I get closer, I feel myself relaxing, a calm coming over me, my nervous system resetting.” That bodily response, she’s sure, is physiological. Tears stream. “This land holds me like nothing else. It feels like coming home; I’m enveloped here.”

It’s early January when I visit. Through the small market town of Rhayader and out into dramatic landscapes, snow-dusted peaks atop rolling hills. A hand-carved sign marks a single-track turning. Through morning mist, The Dreaming comes into view: a three-storey manor almost built into the valley, flanked by moss-lined rocks and woodland. Fresh from being photographed alfresco, Church greets me outdoors: “It’s bloody lush, love, isn’t it?”

It sprawls to 50 acres, 33 of it Celtic rainforest. We pass the waterfall, Nant Gorwen, and yomp deeper into the trees. There’s such joy in her voice as she talks about the seasons changing and wildlife here, and what it means to be this land’s custodian. Visiting practitioners run workshops: womb yoga, willow weaving, night-sky gazing; retreats for grief, queer people, goddesses and another she’ll be leading with “two other witches”.

It’s tempting to be cynical, but Church is aglow, at ease with herself: in a flowy sky-blue dress, sheepskin coat and cowboy boots, the 39-year-old has gone full Earth Mother. There’s a yurt down by the redwoods where Church stays when on-site. “Then in the morning, I’ll come up here and sing to the land.”

And that is…? She grins. “Going round the land and having a little sing at it,” she says, “obviously.” A burst of laughter. “It can be whatever you want it to be.” She looks around then hums, a mournful, melancholic tune. “It’s a dialogue to connect with nature, but your own emotions, too. So much of the time we’re in the dark. Start to sing, everything comes to the surface.”

Church opened The Dreaming to offer respite to guests. Really, though, it became immediately clear, for Church it’s also a much-needed sanctuary. For years, she took regular, vicious poundings in the tabloid press. A child star, her early classical albums went multiplatinum worldwide. In adulthood, record releases have been less forthcoming. “Part of all this for me has been having the time to cocoon and to heal my wounds inflicted in that exposure. I was made such tabloid fodder, for such long periods of time, lots of people just saw me as a celebrity.” A pause. “A piss-head celebrity, really. It was a time with lots of misogyny flying about, especially towards working-class women, or women who were outspoken.”

She came of age in the early noughties: lad mags, body-shaming, a rabid tabloid press capable of unrestrained cruelty. “I was out there, in a toxic culture and environment. I have had to rehabilitate my little creative self. I think I was really exploited. My artistry and talent wasn’t taken seriously. It’s taken some time to remember that I am an artist; to refind my own creativity.”

In November 2020, Church came with her newborn to Rhydoldog House – on the market as a private, residential property – to look around. “It was out of my price range,” she says. “I was just here for a nose: this used to be Laura Ashley’s gaff.” Church was hunting for something else entirely. “A glamping thing, to house an educational, family holiday place.” A neat follow-on from the Awen Project, the free-to-attend, democratic forest school she co-founded in 2019, focused on reconnecting families and rewilding childhood. “And on a personal level, I also didn’t want to have to make a living from show business any longer. I wanted to make art and music, but not be reliant on celebrity; to live more in line with my values. With the money I had left, I wanted to invest in the land.”

Arriving here, she felt a pull. “I cancelled everything else, I knew right away, I could feel it.” We come to a halt. “I stood right here,” says Church, “on this very spot, and realised: ‘Ah, right, this is my life now.’” She waves at the thick, verdant forest ahead. “I had this vision of people full of wonder, play and joy here. I could see women with their feet in the waterfalls crying; writing love-letters to themselves in the trees. What exactly I’d do with a whopping great house I couldn’t afford in need of complete renovation? I didn’t have a fucking clue.” The plot cost £1.5m. “I was going to have to put myself in a really precarious position. Friends and family said I was mental.” They’d be proved right: budgets were blown; Church sunk her life savings long before planning permission was granted. “We’re not breaking even yet here. I’ve taken a lot of financial risk. But I fell in love, and that was it.”

Still and silent, we stand, for a minute, absorbed by nature. “Right, love,” she interrupts, “you have a wander around the woods and I’ll meet you inside. I’m busting for a wazz, see.”

I’m shown around the house by Naoko, the general manager. Guest bedrooms are upstairs. Below, there’s a workshop, library and office, all wooden floorboards, candles and draped curtains; earth tones, gongs everywhere. In the refectory, two long tables. A blackboard sets out the next retreat’s schedule: “celestial blessings” in the elemental garden; “farewells at the fairy door”, etc. Church appears with a loaf of bara brith. “Fancy a tea?” She sings to herself as she puts the kettle on to boil: “I’m a little teapot, short and stout…”

“This land, this project,” she continues, “has taught me a lot.” There’s the practical side of running a business, yes. “I didn’t have a fucking clue, but also about myself. I’ve always been incredibly open, porous as a cloud. Which is sort of insane, considering how much shit I’ve had thrown at me. Here, I’ve learned to have boundaries.”

How so? “I’d always been very free with my trust and care,” she says. “I’m the opposite of misanthropic. I’ve a deep love for people, even when they’ve been awful. I always held that as a badge of honour. That no matter what happened to me, I kept faith. Only, it’s really fucking naive.” She laughs from the belly. “I do still have that,” she clarifies, “but also, get real, babe.”

Being here has taught Church just how desperately she longed for an escape; a place to shelter and take refuge. First, from the strains of family life. She lives with her two teenagers, four-year-old and husband, Jonathan Powell. “I love being a mother, but it’s complicated… bringing up teenagers.” She recently relocated in part to be close to family. “Looking after the rest of them is a lot, particularly my dad, who is terminally ill.” Her stepfather, James, has AL amyloidosis, a rare disease affecting the internal organs. Church’s mum has bipolar, and her parents separated when she was two. Her biological father, Stephen, from whom she was estranged, died of coronavirus in 2021.

“It means I have a massive amount of care duties,” says Church. “I’m back and forth from the hospital, and lots of other things are going on with my extended family. So coming here is a balm. It’s also allowed me to become more of who I am, to drop some of the façade and pretence.”

Primarily, for Church, that has meant being more forthright in her politics. Since her 20s, she has been outspoken. Proudly left-wing, her activism traversing anti-austerity movements, the climate crisis, Palestine: “I’m less afraid of what people think about all that now.” At times, she used to feel almost embarrassed about her ideals. “I’d make out like I couldn’t help that I cared, or act like I was just being rebellious. Now, I feel more backed up, stepping into my integrity. The only way we’ll sort out the right fucking mess the world is in is to come back together, in community. There is no alternative and I will battle until my last breath to do it.”

A colleague plonks down a plate of roast dinner in front of Church. “Do you mind if I munch?” she asks, tucking in. “I’m absolutely fucking ravenous.”

Church can trace that steadfast spirit back to her Cardiff childhood. “My family,” she says, “instilled a fierceness in me: that we fight and love and live with every fibre of our beings. And a sense that you have to battle – my family has struggled for generations; there are scars and intergenerational trauma. I grew up with this sense of who we were, as a working-class family. There was a lot of humour and music, alongside the really fucking dark shit.”

Church was just 11 when she landed her music industry break, singing a phone-in rendition of Pie Jesu on This Morning in 1997. That same year, she performed on an ITV talent show. It catapulted her to international fame: the nation’s sweetheart, “voice of an angel”. Within 12 months, she’d released her first classical album. She performed with orchestras around the world. Music itself, she always adored. “But I was in a hardcore capitalist machine,” says Church. “A child star in a psychological grinder making a lot of money for big corporations. Sure, I fucking hated bits, but I wouldn’t change a thing. I’m deeply grateful for it, what a privilege.”

As she approached her late teens, however, the tabloid press made Church the subject of obsessive attention. There were hidden cameras outside her home, fake stories galore, up-skirting attempts by paparazzi. She believes a suicide attempt by her mother was “at least in part” down to a looming story about the family. Radio DJ Chris Moyles publicly offered to take her virginity as she turned 16, the age of consent. The Sun published a story about her pregnancy before Church had even told her family. “I feel my character,” Church says, “the narrative of who I was in the world, was taken from me, and made into something salacious, or something to be ridiculed.”

She’s confident that “this isn’t me being overly sensitive”. Take her appearance on Question Time in 2015. “I suggested, as was being presented in research at the time, that climate change and drought played a role in war breaking out in Syria.” It was a position posited by a host of experts. “When I said it, it was all over the papers: ‘Voice of an Angel, Brain of Angel Delight: Charlotte Church blames climate change for jihadis.’ I’ve been made into this caricature: sexualised, patronised, ridiculed.”

In 2011, Church detailed the effects in evidence to the Leveson inquiry. “I started to understand deeply what the experience me and my family had at the hands of the press really was,” she says. “How dramatic and painful and shaming and ugly it was for us all. It really politicised me, seeing the insidious relations between police, press and government. Especially meeting Milly Dowler’s family. It ignited that fierceness in me, latent before then, maybe, but deep within the female line of my family: right, fuck you fuckers, I’m coming for you all.”

For a while, the attacks intensified. “It was revenge,” Church believes. “They tried to discredit me as hard as they could. To make me a figure of ridicule who was thick, and a tart, and a drunk.” The diatribes, she’s sure, were brimming with classism and misogyny. “Now don’t get me wrong, I got myself into certain…” She comes to a stop, reassessing. “Well did I, actually? I mean, I had sex. I went clubbing with friends. Only the tabloids were always right there, poised to orchestrate any sort of downfall.”

Through her 20s, Church had become an impassioned activist. “It started with having kids. It started to prickle things in my soul. Thinking about society – about others – in a way I hadn’t as a pretty egocentric teenager.” Church had her first of two children with rugby player Gavin Henson at 21. The couple split in 2010.

She met her current husband 15 years ago. “We started writing music together.” He plays guitar and viola. “He really introduced me to the more formal political sphere. Before then, I’d never voted; I wasn’t remotely interested. I felt it had nothing to do with me, aside from being certain I paid too much tax when I was a teenager.” Aged 14, at the Labour party conference, Church set out this very stall to Tony Blair, then prime minister.

So when the media intrusion escalated after Leveson, Church felt emboldened. “I was growing up, getting a hold of myself, with a towering brainbox partner by my side,” she says. The pair jointly wrote her statement after she settled her phone-hacking claim against the News of the World in 2012 for £600,000. The now-defunct paper admitted her voicemails were hacked repeatedly over a number of years, and that they’d “unlawfully obtained” then published “private medical information” about Church and her mother. “They basically forced us to settle,” says Church, “otherwise I’d have happily taken it all the way and tried to nail them to the floor. But they were putting my mother in far too much danger.” She cuts herself off. “I can’t really talk about that, blah blah blah. More tea, love?”

The tabloid drubbings have died down in recent years. Based on the speed at which any sniff of a story spreads across gossip columns and sidebars-of-shame, it’s likely to be a consequence of Church’s relative absence from the public eye, rather than a lack of malintent or interest. Her recent public positions on Palestine have, however, attracted headline-making criticism.

Today, she’s wearing a keffiyeh; Church has spoken at marches, fundraised and performed at Palestine solidarity events. “What’s happening there,” she says, “is the greatest spiritual awakening of our time. Children are being killed in the most cruel way. To me, it’s an absolute no-brainer.” Loud and public accusations of antisemitism have been directed her way. “It’s unpleasant to weather those things,” she says, “have my name dragged through the mud and my family’s security put at risk. But what else is there?” She’s resolute. “I don’t know what the alternative is – its so fucking serious.”

And then, of course, there’s all of this. Does she not worry about being painted as a hippy-dippy tree-hugger? She sips her herbal tea. “I don’t mind being castigated or ridiculed for it,” Church says. She leans in, and drops into a whisper. “Because I know the gold, the feeling. How much more enriched life becomes when you embark on this journey. There’s such beauty here, living in the world this way.”

With that same resolve, she’s making new music, too. “I’m going to release an album,” she says, “hopefully, in 2026.” It’ll be her first since 2010. It doesn’t sound like a commercial proposition – “I’m meeting indigenous elders in Peru, Burkina Faso, Australia… I want to sing about nature, healing and sisterhood” – but that’s of little concern. “I want to create experiences,” she says, “to really make people feel. Pop Dungeon did that, in a way.” Long, sweaty nights spent dancing to the cover band she fronted became the stuff of legend. “We would get people excited, ecstatic and into hysteria. So much of modern society is trying to manufacture a minor emotional reaction from you with fake shit. To really whip people up in music, song and rhythm is the greatest magic.”

We speak for almost two hours about sound healing, creating ritual and communing with the cosmos. It’s striking how appealing she makes it all sound: not preachy or tiringly tedious. She’s foul-mouthed, quick-witted, great company. In this new dawn, Church is still a laugh, basically.

“Listen,” she makes clear, “I’m not holier-than-thou. Life is difficult; do what you need to do to get through it. All last year I was smoking.” She’s now quit again. “I have, naturally with age, stopped going out drinking so much. But I still dance my tits off, regular, do not worry. Just now, it’s less drunk in a club, more at home with friends, or at 6am, alone on a beach, absolutely shaking my arse as an act of devotion. So no, I’m not rebranding.” A shake of the head. “I fucking hate all the pious wellness industry shite. So much of that multi-billion-dollar pile of crap says ‘do this’, ‘buy that’, ‘subscribe to me’, ‘swallow a pill’, and this result will happen. It’s all bollocks.” She gestures out the window. “All this is much more esoteric. We’re not trying to get people to subscribe to a programme. It’s not all peace, love, light; stillness and meditation. It’s exploration. Have a go, and see what works.” That’s been Church’s approach. “I’m not an expert, I’m just following my nose and intuition.”

She knows it could have gone so differently: child star turned tabloid target. “I’ve certainly done my hard yards,” she says. “I’m proud that I’ve survived. That even as a little one, I’ve had courage.” The sun is starting to set. Her yurt awaits. One final question.

When Church first set foot here, feeling all she did, was she not tempted to snap it up for herself? Shut the world out and raise her family? She smiles, then turns towards the dusk-drenched valley. “Well,” she replies, “I’m a socialist. I believe in public luxury. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been driven to heal and help. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the early Celtic and religious songs I sang were found by many to be healing.” What she’s doing now feels full circle. “I see people suffering, whether in my immediate network of family and friends, or out among my kin and peoples. I want to do something about it. That first day, I asked: how could this beauty belong to one family? It might be the way it is in the world today, the wealthy owning vast swathes of the best of nature, but it’s bullshit. This beauty right here is a thing for sharing.”

For more about The Dreaming, visit thedreaming.co.uk

• This article was amended on 23 March 2025. An earlier version misnamed Charlotte Church’s stepfather as “Stephen”; he is James Church. Stephen, as the article goes on to say, was the name of the singer’s biological father.