The luxury retreat in one of England’s oldest rainforests
A new eco-friendly destination in Cornwall can help to restore your soul and mend the environment
Not many people would call a tree “a real babe” — particularly one that’s fairly wide of girth, cracked of skin and 380 years of age. But Merlin Hanbury-Tenison has all his life been connected with the Cornish forest in which he is standing. When he looks up at the trees, soft autumn sunlight filtering through the oak leaves, it’s clear that he’s not just happy in this place but totally rooted. They’re part of who he is.
That’s not only because it was here, around this “babe” of Bodmin Moor, that the 38-year-old was brought up. Or that it was here, with his father, the 87-year-old explorer Robin — a co-founder of Survival International and the former chief executive of the Countryside Alliance — that he learnt to ride, climb and shoot, and gain the physical attributes he’d need to join the British military. And it was here, suffering from severe PTSD after three tours of Afghanistan and “some pretty gruelling, spirit-breaking” years in the City, that he was, as he puts it, “nursed by nature” and “was able to start to rebuild myself: my mind, my body, my family and our future”.
When he talks about “our future”, he means not only that of his family — his wife, Lizzie, a dynamic strategist who has headed up marketing for companies from Green & Black’s to Charlotte Tilbury, and their two children — but the forest. Within the family’s 300-acre farm on rolling hills south of Bodmin Moor lies a tract of one of the oldest Atlantic temperate forests left in Britain. Once, these sorts of forests — made up primarily of oak, hazel and rowan, and sustained by constant rainfall and humidity — stretched across Europe, from southern Cornwall to the west coast of Scotland, over to Spain and as far north as Norway. Slowly, over millennia, they were cut down. Today Europe, he says, has only about 33 per cent of tree cover, and Britain 14 per cent. And of those, he adds, there are “just tiny, tiny pockets of our original Atlantic temperate rainforest left”.
Why that is a disaster at a time of climate change, he explains as we walk across the Cornish pastures and down into his steep, ancient 80-acre forest around the Bedalder river, is because this rainforest is not only made up of trees. Unlike new forests grown for buildings and furniture — of fast-growing spruce, say, under which no other plants grow — ancient forests sustain layers of life all around them. Look up, he instructs, “and you’ll see an extraordinary layer of complexity. There is Old Man’s Beard — that only grows in extremely clean air — which here festoons the branches. Then there are epiphytes and mosses, liverworts and pennyworts, sphagnum moss and bilberries and wood rush, which only grows in ancient woodland. Around these oak forests about 600 species thrive. And many of those species are carbon sequesters that help to take carbon from the air.”
If we are to try and reverse climate change, he believes, what we need to do is not only plant trees but plant the right trees. Which in his mind is “the babe tree” — the oak — in enormous numbers across the country. Instead of just one tree soaking up carbon, he explains, “you have hundreds of species around it, including layers of fungus, all of which communicate in one wood-wide web”.
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To galvanise others to join the quest, in May the couple launched a charity, the Thousand Year Trust, through which they hope to raise funds to try to triple Britain’s surviving rainforest to a million acres over the next 30 years. And to get people to fall in love with the project they’ve transformed a former farm barn into a restorative wellness destination. With a large contemporary living space and 12 A-frame Koyt timber cabins, here they run three-night retreats, ranging from weeks for burnt-out NHS nurses and soldiers suffering from PTSD to “Dirty Weekends” for those wanting space to think, to do gentle movement classes with their intuitive therapist Pippa Richardson, to walk barefoot in the moss and lichen-festooned forest, and, as Merlin puts, it “find their own roots, their own link with the earth”.
For those who want something slightly more luxurious, this month they are launching their first Ground & Grow retreats based at the Pig at Harlyn Bay hotel, 40-minutes’ drive away, which will include walks, meditations and classes at Cabilla, cold swimming and hot saunas on Harlyn Beach, and delicious healthy meals at the glamorous 17-century hotel.
Some of the proceeds will go towards planting oak trees — which they’re trying to persuade other farmers across Cornwall to do too — and bringing back more animals that work in tandem with nature, from pigs and wild horses to pine martens. In 2027, Merlin points out, the agricultural subsidies to upland farmers from the EU will end — and given that “about 90 per cent of their income comes from subsidy, that’s going to be incredibly difficult for many of them”. This project, he hopes, will inspire other farmers to join their movement. Since the couple’s project started five years ago they’ve increased farm employees from “a few to 14”, which in a county with very little employment “could be replicated pretty easily elsewhere”.
“If we can transform 10,000-12,000 acres over the next five years and prove that our uplands can be used to improve not only nature and wellbeing but our ecosystem and carbon sequestration, we will have gone some way to prove that we can, as humans, build a self-sustaining natural environment. A new, more balanced way of living.”
The couple recognise that it’s not going to happen in their lifetime — hence the name the Thousand Year Trust. An oak tree can live for 700 years and take another 300 to break down. But already big companies and organisations have signed up to help them, including the Eden Project — its ecologists helped them to age the forest (to “about 3,664 years, give or take 29 years”) — and Guy Shrubsole, the author of bestseller The Lost Rainforests of Britain, who is a trustee of their charity.
Having spent time in the forest with the Cabilla team, stretching my limbs with Hanbury-Tenison and opening my mind with extraordinarily intuitive Richardson before eating and hunkering beside a fire at the Pig, I can vouch that a weekend here really can be transformative — not just for the landscape but for the people who visit. Merlin warned me: “This place is magic.” He’s right.
A two-night Ground & Grow retreat costs from £865pp for two nights in November, January and March, and from £1,125pp for three nights in March, inclusive of accommodation and all meals at the Pig at Harlyn Bay, as well as swimming and sauna on the beach, and talks, walks, movement and meditation at Cabilla; thepighotel.com
