Gold Green Tourism Award

We were absolutely thrilled to be awarded Gold status for Green Tourism by Visit England. This is the top award available through the certification programme that recognises the commitment of tourism businesses to become more sustainable. This came hot on the heels of us receiving a bronze at the Welcome to Yorkshire White Rose Awards for an environmentally sustainable business.

To receive the Visit England award all our green credentials were checked over, including things like our model of boiler in the tea-room. We were marked on our approach to energy usage, saving water, waste disposal, ethical buying, minimising food miles, promoting biodiversity and having a sustainable ethos.

This award is acknowledged world-wide as an indicator of an environmentally friendly business and we look forward to sharing our sustainable ethos with our visitors this summer.

We are not resting on our laurels. Every year we look at how we can become even more eco-friendly and implement new methods and ideas. Have a look at what we have done in both the garden  and tea-room  to earn the award. A lot of these are really simple ideas that you can implement in your life too.

This year we are looking at moving to peat-free compost in the plant nursery. Using peat free compost is good for the environment in that it is not extracting precious resources from an endangered habitat. However, peat-free compost requires much more watering and water is a precious resource in itself, not to mention the time resource needed to water over 800 plants more regularly.