A greener kind of holiday

When we moved into Pickwell Manor more than a decade ago, the manor house and its grounds were in need of some love and care, and a rethink as to how to use the space.

We are passionate about the environment at Pickwell, so we made the decision very early on to make sustainability just as important as any other factor in creating the kind of place we wanted to live.

The bigger stuff

One of the first things we did was replace the oil-fired boiler with a biomass boiler that provides all our heating and hot water. This saves approx. 50 tonnes of C02 emissions a year compared to the oil we were using before.

We also installed a 32KW solar panel array behind the house that gives us about 40% of all the energy we need, and get the other half from 100% renewable supplies courtesy of our supplier, Bulb. We store the electricity from the panels in our Powervault battery which we use to run our electric cars and bikes.

Meanwhile we have our own borehole that supplies all our water, and we are dangerously passionate about recycling and composting (if you don’t believe us check out the bells-and-whistles facilities we’ve created).

The smaller stuff

We keep looking at everything that we do here to see if we can do it more sustainably. That’s why we’ve taken lots of little decisions that (we hope) all add up to big change.

Like our two electric bikes that will give a helping hand to keep you fit and take the strain out of the Devon hills. You can hire them for just £15 each a day.

We make sure all our outdoor benches and chairs are made from FSC wood. We’ve swapped out all our toiletries for ones made here in Britain to reduce air miles. All our wood comes from our own sustainable woodland.

We’ve also introduced our own bee hives as well as carved out a patch in the grounds for our very own goats, ducks and chickens to go wild and crazy (not together obviously, that would be madness).

We could go on, but we won’t, because a) a list of things is innately boring and b) you’ve read this far - you deserve a break. Needless to say, if you’d like a chat about any of this stuff, just come and find us when you’re here or drop us a line.

We believe in putting our money where our manor is, so every single penny of the profits from Pickwell Manor and our treehouses goes to the charitable foundation we set up. You can find out more here about the work the Pickwell Foundation does for people and planet here.