Tamar Valley accommodation, bed and breakfast in Cornwall

We do, in our everyday lives, what we believe most people are doing to varying degrees, to help safeguard the flavour of the area we live in, to try to minimise the use of our natural resources, and to minimise waste.

Our intention is not to preach or bang a drum, because we recognise that guests are on holiday, after all, but we are happy to highlight what we do, and to talk with guests about various aspects if they are interested. We are often given ideas by guests as a consequence.

To this end, we highlight the fact that Cornwall is a living community, and support that community, by using what the area produces to give a true sense of place. We are lucky to have many high quality food and drink producers locally, making full use of them in our breakfast and evening meal menus. If we are unable to source locally we will buy Fairtrade when possible.

We have a visitor gifting scheme in place which allows guests to contribute to a local initiative which promotes food production and heritage within the Tamar Valley. Our contributions, passed on every three months, normally go towards the cost of setting up visits to local schools to discuss how food is produced, and how the pupils can grow their own food.

We are actively involved with the local tourism association, are always learning new things about the immediate and surrounding areas, are happy to pass on what we have discovered to guests, and to advise on days out that don’t require hours spent in the car. You will find a number of interesting books about the Tamar Valley and Cornwall in the dining room as well as Cornish magazines in your room, and are welcome to borrow any of the maps that we have.

Our electricity is bought from Good Energy, from 100% renewable supplies. We use low energy light bulbs in all appropriate fittings, encourage guests to let us know if towels haven’t been used, and supply bags in the rooms so that recyclable materials can be separated. All organic waste is composted (or fed to the chickens if they have been good girls), and anything that can be recycled is, via the local kerbside scheme, or in the case of printer cartridges, via local schools.

Energy and water usage, and waste are monitored on a weekly basis. This has enabled us to make changes to our behaviour, and also to raise questions about the business. Small changes include switching off equipment instead of leaving leaving appliances on standby and using the central heating at the barest minimum when we have no guests in (we have big wood burners in our own living spaces, so don’t get the impression that we are martyrs!). A couple of old fridges are earmarked for upgrading after working out how much energy they use, and how much they are costing us.

One of the biggest changes we made was to switch from serving freshly squeezed orange juice at breakfast, to serving a local apple juice (juice from our own and neighbours apples for several months, in fact!), after weighing the volume of orange skins we were sending to landfill every week. This has a number of obvious benefits, not least of which is the fact that you will start the day with a truer flavour of the Tamar Valley.

For us, the most enjoyable aspect of trying to live sustainably, engaging with suppliers, being involved with organisations that promote a similar ethos, and having people visit us and the area, is the realisation that these activities are not particularly time consuming or costly to implement, that they make life more rewarding, not more difficult, and that we are not operating within a vacuum.