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At one with Nature

Visit us and learn about our projects for protecting and appreciating the natural world around us.

Mobirise
Unfortunately the old pond and the standing dead oak tree are not accessible to guests for safety reasons. 

Nonetheless you can sit on the raised pond bank and watch/draw/paint/photograph the pond. It’s home to frogs, toads, newts, damselflies and dragonflies. 


Half the land here is naturally wooded, some of it very old. We leave the undergrowth in place and dead branches litter the wood floor. At dawn, dusk and after the rain you have birdsong (nightingale, cuckoo, golden oriole, hoopoe). Other lodgers in the woodland include mosquitoes, hornets, ticks, fleas and harvest mites. 

Mobirise



Our old tractor maintains about 3km of tracks in the fields. Many of these tracks are changed from one year to the next to keep a mosaic of vegetation of different heights and ages. This gives insects etc somewhere to live and hide while they complete their life-cycles

Mobirise
Bramble-corridors (sometimes 2m high) reinforce fence limits, retain the soil on steep slopes and buffer some of the copse and woodland edges. They give shelter to nesting birds and various mammals including wild boar. Bramble flowers are rich in nectar and give the honey a special taste.

We have a small apiary, the bees fly to the pond to drink. 

The figs, blackberries and wild plums ripen in August and September, and we’ll lend you a basket so you can pick them. 

Our Projects

Our wildlife audits and affiliations 




The first professional wildlife audit here was done in 2002. Since then we’re slowly building up a picture of a rich and diverse ecosystem. Some of the classes studied include Coleopteres, Lepidopteres, Orthopteres, Odonates, Ornithology. More than 300 Coleopteres have been identified so far, and almost 300 Lepidopteres. 

We hope you’ll look at the inventories while you are here. There is also the option to have your own approximately 2 hour guided tour with a local professional naturalist (at extra cost and needs to be booked in advance).  

Our affiliations

 
We belong to several regional, national and international associations which all help their members to protect, manage, evaluate and identify wildlife. These associations represent a pool of expertise from which many of our experts have come:

Mobirise

A rural retreat

CONTACT 

If you have a query, would like to know about availability or would like to book, please phone our fixed line (05 63 26 12 72) or send an email (below). The mobile signal here is erratic, so we use the fixed line. There are only 3 rings before the ansaphone goes on - please leave a msg if no one picks up and we'll get back to you quickly.