THE pressures of modern life mean that most of us have probably dreamt at one time or another of fleeing to the hills. But real-life caveman Angelo Mastropietro has made his hermit dream a reality - by spending over £160,000 turning a 700-year-old cave, carved into 250 million year old sandstone cliffs in the the Wyre Forest, into his dream home. The 38-year-old, originally from Worcestershire, was living a high-flying life as the head of a successful recruitment company in Australia when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007. The condition led to him being temporarily paralysed - and inspired him to seek a simpler life.
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00:00 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO My life before I became a caveman was really quite different.
00:05 COMM: The pressures of modern life mean that
00:13 most of us have probably dreamt at one time or another of fleeing to the hills.
00:20 COMM: But Angelo Mastropietro has made his hermit dream a reality by spending over £160,000 making a house out of a cave.
00:31 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO I'm 38 years old and I'm a caveman.
00:38 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO I love a challenge and I mean I guess coincidentally my surname actually means 'Master of the Stone'.
00:48 So you know maybe it's kind of in my blood.
00:51 COMM: He did most of the work himself. Even more incredible when you consider that only a few years ago,
00:57 the businessman was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
01:00 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO I had a lapse that left me paralysed essentially, which was really the catalyst to make me review where I was at,
01:09 where I was going and obviously my lifestyle.
01:14 The rock house kind of came along and you know without a shadow of a doubt I was as passionate about that as I was about setting up my company.
01:23 COMM: The 250 million year old sandstone cliffs near the Wyre Forest are said to have inspired Tolkien when he was writing 'Lord of the Rings'.
01:33 It was here that Angelo spent £62,000 on this 700-year-old abandoned cave, which he would turn into his very own hobbit hole.
01:43 With a renovation budget of £100,000, Angelo set about doing most of the physically demanding work himself.
01:51 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO In the end I spent somewhere around about a thousand hours basically breaking rock, cutting rock, burrowing rock.
02:01 You know it totaled somewhere around about 70 or 80 tonnes of rubble that I excavated out of this rock house by hand.
02:09 And really proof of that is the whole of the terrace outside. There's literally a hundred square metres of terrace out there.
02:16 None of that was there when I started, so that is all of the rubble that I've excavated.
02:21 The completed rock house's impressive features are anything but stone age. It even has Wi-Fi.
02:28 One of the things that's kind of impressive about the restoration is really what you don't see.
02:33 We've put ventilation channels in the floor.
02:37 One of the things that I was quite passionate about doing was trying to retain the integrity of the rock house by not cutting in any chasings in to hide wires.
02:48 This would originally have been the bedroom.
02:52 These little nooks either side which I've lit up to give the illusion of light channels kind of casting light down.
03:04 Coming through into the shower room, so we've got under floor heating in here.
03:08 One of the biggest kind of engineering feats.
03:12 This is where I'd excavated this kind of shelf and then subsequently I dug down and created a shower.
03:21 All of the fresh running water comes from Angelo's own borehole which he sank 80 metres into the ground.
03:28 These were originally two separate spaces so the first task was I excavated this doorway.
03:34 So to start off, cut the top and literally cut down, repeat the process so that the whole of the area that you're looking to remove was cut into stripes.
03:46 And then remove the sections of rock and just literally repeat, repeat, repeat.
03:53 Eleven days later, he kind of made my way through.
03:58 Although the cave house was originally built as a holiday let, Angelo still harbours the ambition of one day living full time in his unusual property.
04:17 When you're actually here and you see it in person you get a feel for the place. I literally had people in tears.
04:24 You know I feel incredibly happy, very proud, very honoured. It's been a very inspiring chapter I think.
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