Bruern Holiday Cottages & The Environment

At Bruern, we aim to recycle as much as possible. There are big recycling bins in the dustbin enclosure for bottles and paper, and in every kitchen there's a green Brabantia bin for vegetable waste. This goes onto the compost heap with grass-mowings, weeds, shredded prunings and hedge-clippings. All this is eventually used on the garden, in place of peat. All the cleaning products we use are green and people friendly, made by Ecover.

In every holiday cottage, there's a Bruern Out-and-About box, for people who love wildlife, walking and the countryside, and don't want to use their cars. In it can be found books on birds, butterflies and wild flowers, Ordinance Survey maps, maps of local footpaths and cycle routes, bus and railway timetables, food and pub guides. We have bought several mountain bikes to add to our venerable collection, and guests are free to borrow them. They can also borrow binoculars from Jenny in the Bruern Shop.

The garden is a haven for animals - badgers, foxes, rabbits, hares, squirrels, muntjac deer, and also the fifty-eight different species of bird already spotted at Bruern. The list is on the Green Notice Board in the Games Room, and we encourage people to add to it. We provide feeding tubes and lard cakes to help birds through the winter, and nesting boxes in spring. One patch of garden is deliberately left wild, to provide a feeding ground for caterpillars and a nesting site for birds.

We keep the holiday cottages warm as toast without waste, with curtains double-lined, roofs, walls and floors insulated, and doors and windows draught-stripped; there are Jetmasters on every open fire, and every radiator has a thermostatic control. Where we can, we put in energy saving electric light bulbs - but not everywhere, because we find the level of light they give isn't quite the equivalent of the 100 watts we think you need for reading.

If you want to support our local farmers, look on the Green Notice Board for the dates and venues of Farmers' Markets, and the address of a wonderful Farm Shop only the other side of Burford. Ken, the chef who makes Bruern Holiday Cottages frozen meals, have a policy of using only good, fresh, local produce. We have a special relationship with BBOWT, the Wildlife Trust which runs Foxholes Nature Reserve, next to Bruern. The £500 we give them every year pays for the rides to be mowed and paths kept clear, so you can walk through woodland which looks much the same as it did a millennium ago: a sea of bluebells in May and a home for badgers, deer and other woodland creatures. Guests who feel, as we do, that it's a worthwhile cause, can donate £1 to BBOWT by ticking the relevant box on the Payment Form, which we will then match. Alternatively, there's a collecting box in the Games Room. We are incredibly lucky to live in a place as beautiful as Bruern. It gives us, and our guests, so much that we feel we should treat it well in return.