Dick and John Wheelock inherited the Treowen estate in 1991. The estate comprises 250 acres of farmland, 190 acres of woodland and Treowen, a Jacobean manor house. At the time we inherited it only nine of the twelve bedrooms were habitable.
We had both farmed at Treowen in partnership with our parents. We were both diagnosed with farmers’ lung in the early 1980s and so decided to give up farming in 1986. The farm was let on a five year tenancy while our parents and one of our sisters continued to live at Treowen. Dick started a new business making and restoring furniture. John trained as a chartered accountant.
By 1992 our parents had moved out of Treowen and our sister, Emma, was converting one of the redundant farm buildings into her new home. The estate income from agriculture and forestry had not proved sufficient over the years to provide for the maintenance of Treowen. There was an urgent need to find a financially sustainable future for the estate.
Two major sources of income were identified: the letting of Treowen for self-catering holidays and the residential conversion of the redundant cow sheds and loose boxes close to Treowen. Fortunately, in the 1970s the main farm buildings had been moved to a more sheltered site in Treowen Wood several hundred yards from the house so there was little agricultural use of any of the farm buildings close to Treowen.
By 2012 the letting of Treowen for self-catering holidays and the letting of the residential conversion of the cow sheds and loose boxes had secured the financial sustainability of the estate. Four two-bedroom houses and one one-bedroom house had been created largely with our own labour.
At the same time with grant aid from the Tir Gofal agri-environmental scheme the biodiversity of the estate had been substantially increased by;
- The planting of 2,400 metres of hedge
- The restoration of five historic fish ponds. These fish ponds are generally considered to predate the house. The dams of all of them had been breached for many years and none held any water
- The replanting of the small remaining orchard with cider apples and perry pears. Monmouthshire was traditionally a cider growing area. Nineteenth century maps of the estate show there were considerable area of orchards
- The creation and protection of 460 metres of streamside corridors
The next stage of the journey was to diversify the income of the estate and to reduce its carbon footprint by investing in renewable energy. The oil-fired boilers for the heating of Treowen and the residential conversions were replaced with two central biomass boilers heating all these properties. The two oil fired boilers were recycled to provide a backup for biomass boilers. All the roofs of the modern barns with a suitable aspect were covered in solar panels. The estate is now a net exporter of electricity.
An electric vehicle charging point, powered by the solar panels on the barn nearest to Treowen was intalled available free of charge to anyone.
The next steps on the journey are:
- the more challenging one of decarbonizing the isolated houses on the estate which can’t be connected to the central biomass heating system. We have installed a log gasification boiler to replace an oil fired boiler in one house and are currently researching the feasibility of a ground source heat pump for the other with solar panels for both.
- bringing the woodland back into active management for which a Forest Management Plan in accordance with UK Forestry Standards has just been approved by Natural Resources Wales.