How we are building a
Sustainable

Our mission at Wold Escapes is to offer our guests and students an unforgettable, eco-friendly escape surrounded by the natural beauty of the Yorkshire Wolds. Whether you’re unwinding in a private hot tub in one of our glamping cabins or our farmhouse, exploring the scenic countryside or attending one of our cookery courses, you can relax knowing your visit to us supports a sustainable future.

Our key initiatives:

• Solar panels generating electricity on the roof of our farmhouse
• Air source heat pumps powering each of our glamping cabins and hot tubs
• Supporting local businesses to provide ingredients for our cookery courses, catering including breakfast and BBQ boxes for our guests.
• Accessible accommodation for our farmhouse, B&B and cookery school guests
• Willow from our farm being used for our willow weaved fences adding privacy between our glamping cabins
• An EV car charger is available for guests
• We use fallen trees on the farm for benches on our farmland walks or make them into bark chippings for our paths and logs for our fire pits.
• Wildflower meadow acting as a pollinator and increases biodiversity in the area and is also very pretty to look at!
• Multi-species trees planted around the site as well as 6,000 at our Chalk Stream Sanctuary on the farm with plans for more

Our farmhouse has had roof mounted solar panels since 2014. These generate 10 KW per hour when the sun is shining and are capable of generating 10,000 KW per year, all of which goes to powering the Wold Escapes site.

In 2025 we installed eight state-of-the-art air source heat pumps to power our cabins as well as our hot tubs. These air source heat pumps are far more energy efficient than traditional heating methods, typically using one third of the electricity than the previous system, shrinking our carbon footprint whilst we benefit from a more reliable energy source.

“If we want to keep expanding, we can’t simply increase our carbon footprint. Proactively reducing our impact is essential,” says Georgina Renfrew, Manager at Wold Escapes. “Our guests appreciate our efforts too. Many are environmentally conscious and value knowing their stay supports a greener future.”

We also periodically run energy efficiency initiatives focussing on areas of wastage which has led to LED lighting, timers and heating schedules. These initiatives have already generated a reduction of 10% in electricity.

As part of a large family owned farm we also have access to farm walks across our chalk stream sanctuary, our own private nature reserve which has been planted with multi-species trees and hedges, pond scrapes for native wading birds and reintroduced native rare plants back to the area. We also work with local nature reserve Tophill Low.

Guests have exclusive access to walks around the chalk stream sanctuary which are not available to the general public. The biodiversity in this area is growing naturally as many different species of wildflowers, birds, fish and small mammals make it their home. You may be lucky enough to spot some kingfishers, brown trout or water voles in the chalk stream, or even great egrets and ospreys.

Around the farm, including the fields and woodland surrounding Wold Escapes, we have put up many owl and bat boxes giving our flying residents somewhere safe to stay and breed their young.

Here is a beautiful female barn owl chick which local owl expert Rob came and rung. Rob has been licenced to ring owls for over 20 years and visits all our boxes to see how our owl population is doing. This owlet was aged at 54 days old based by measuring her seventh primary feather.

Around the fields surrounding Wold Escapes you will see wildflower meadows. As well as looking beautiful these have a very specific purpose acting as pollinator strips and homes for birds and bees. Here they can live in their preferred environment and pollinate the crops in the fields which is also useful for our farm.

We have also made room for some very special guests at Wold Escapes: honey bees! A local beekeeper keeps his hives on our farm, where the bees happily buzz around our wildflowers and the arable crops on our farm, making tonnes of delicious honey, which you can buy at Wold Escapes. Not only does it taste amazing, but the bees also help to pollinate our fields, which means better crops and a healthier landscape for everyone to enjoy.

Any fallen wood from our farmland is gathered up and turned it into seating outside our glamping cabins or on walks, or it has been chipped to make natural paths to our cabins.

Willow grown on the farm is used to make the living fences between our cabins which give our guest privacy during their stay with us.

Our B&B and farmhouse has an accessible bedroom, Southburn room, on the ground floor next to the lounge which has a wet room with disabled access toilet and shower. Many guests comment on how lovely it is to have a disabled room in our rural location and we get many repeat guests using the Southburn room.

In our cookery school we are able to lower our work stations and regularly host disability groups for cookery classes and team building events.

In our cookery school kitchen we aim to use and serve local produce where possible. The meat we use for classes and in our guests’ breakfasts is from our local butchers, Rose Cottage, who source meat locally. We use our local greengrocers, Rafters in Driffield for our fresh produce and flowers, support the local farm shop at Cranswick for groceries and use local suppliers such as Roberts and Speight wine merchants in Beverley, locally made beer fromWold Top and Hodgesons fish.

Where possible we use potatoes and peas grown on the farm. Food miles don’t get much lower than this!

Local transport is always encouraged and many of our guests travel by train to Driffield (3 miles away) or Hutton Cranswick railway station (1.5 miles away).

If you are staying with us you are welcome to use our EV car charger. To book it in simply email info@woldescapes.co.uk ahead of your stay.

We also have a secure bike shed with an electricity supply if you have an e-bike, as well as bike racks outside our farmhouse to encourage guests to leave their car in the car park when possible.

At Wold Escapes we like to use all natural resources we can and have a water butt to collect rainwater which we use to water our pots and floral boarders.