In the centre of an ancient oak glade at the 4,000-acre Wasing Estate in Berkshire is a spiritual portal. Di Dugdale, whose husband Josh dates his family’s ownership of Wasing back to 1759, knows this because multiple healers, shamans and seers have told her so.
Since 2020, when the Dugdales launched Medicine Festival, the couple have been at the vanguard of alternative estate events, bringing indigenous leaders from around the world to Wasing to pass on wisdom, music and their understanding of the natural world to the curious-minded. Solstice and Equinox, immersive festivals blending music, ritual and the natural world, followed. Wasing is now launching a wellness and literary festival this May, Well Read (disclosure: I am speaking there about regenerative farming). The aim of each event and experience is, says Josh, “to connect people to nature”. But with estate-sized bills, do these enterprises hold the potential to help these stately homes pay their way in more ways than one?
The Dugdales are part of a growing group of estate owners finding new ways to open their land to a paying public. Weddings and music festivals have long been the revenue of choice, but the latter are proving tough in an oversaturated market riven with challenges. Last year, more than 70 UK music festivals were paused or played their last, including those that had been annual fixtures of the summer season for nearly two decades — such as Standon Calling, hosted by Alex Trenchard on his family’s Hertfordshire estate, and Secret Garden Party on Freddie Fellowes’ farm in Cambridgeshire. All cited rising costs as one of the reasons.
The pivot to wellbeing has already seen some boutique festivals incorporate wellness experiences alongside their musical line-ups, such as Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire and Latitude in Suffolk. Others, including Camp Bestival in Dorset, are introducing it.
Many of these new initiatives were kick-started by Covid-19, when a furloughed nation did some collective soul-searching and underwent a well-reported nature awakening. Country estates were in a position to offer what people were looking for, which, as Josh explains, turned out to be “ice baths, lake swimming and sauna sessions, yoga, breathwork and forest bathing”.
The list of ways an urban populace can buy solace and reconnection to the natural world is growing. The Global Wellness Institute valued the wellness economy at $6.3tn in 2023, projecting it to reach $9tn by 2028. The UK market represents $224bn of this and offers, says the GWI, the eighth-largest wellness tourism market. For estate owners with the desire — and the land — the move from weddings into wellness seems a savvy one. But does it stack up?
“We have borrowed a million quid,” says Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, when asked what it costs to start such a venture. He and his wife, Lizzie, run nature retreats on their 250-acre hill farm, Cabilla, in Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor. Hanbury-Tenison took over the land from his father in 2016 just as the Brexit vote put an end to traditional agricultural subsidies. Their Grade 4 land, which was “only good for cattle and sheep”, says Hanbury-Tenison, was never going to be financially viable as a farm. But Cabilla had something extraordinarily rare hidden within it: one of the last remaining pieces of Europe’s temperate rainforest.
The potential of such a place to offer solace was experienced first hand by Hanbury-Tenison when he was recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving three tours in Afghanistan. He describes how the land aided both his recovery and Lizzie’s from the pain of fertility struggles in his recent debut book, Our Oaken Bones. The couple became convinced they could offer the benefits they received to others.
They see Cabilla as an antidote for a nature-starved public (in the UK, 38 per cent of people live more than a 15-minute walk from a green space). It’s “somewhere to experience real wilderness; you don’t hear traffic, you can still drink from the river, still see stars at night”, says Hanbury-Tenison. He is clear they “did not want to become a boutique hotel or a members’ club”, and offer only structured, short retreats in 12 two-bed cabins. In the past four years, they have had more than 3,000 visitors; they have also committed to tripling the size of the rainforest.
This duality is baked into Cabilla’s business plan which includes the formation of a charity, the Thousand Year Trust, to fund replanting of native rainforest. It enables them to “heal humans while also healing nature”, Hanbury-Tenison says.
In the book Losing Eden, author Lucy Jones considers the practice of forest bathing, which in Japan has long been integrated into formal healthcare. Two 2019 studies found that the increased serotonin levels and changes in brain chemistry experienced while surrounded by trees measurably improved health and wellbeing: decreasing heart rate, reducing blood pressure, improving auto and immune function, and significantly alleviating depressive symptoms. A 2023 University of Sheffield study suggested this may be due to the natural volatile organic compounds found exclusively on a forest understorey. It’s not just down to a dose of dappled sunlight but a result of breathing in soil microbes specific to a forest floor, says Jones.
Europe is slowly catching up. A 2021 report by Forest Research estimated that woodlands save the NHS £16mn in antidepressant costs annually, a figure they considered “conservative”. In 2024, a two-year, £5.8mn cross-government “green social prescribing” pilot, launched across seven areas including Greater Manchester and Nottinghamshire, was granted an extension. The scheme enabled GPs to hand out “nature-based interventions”, prescribing gardening, open-water swimming and park membership over pills. There was an 85 per cent uptake.
The growing mainstream interest in the benefits the natural world has to offer was not lost on Hugh Somerleyton, the co-founder of WildEast, a charity set up to encourage rewilding in East Anglia. In 2017, he inherited Somerleyton Hall in Norfolk and its surrounding 5,000 acres, along with a ready-made wellness model. The property’s two-mile-long lake already had about 60 cabins clustered around it, owned and occupied “mostly by retirees”, says Somerleyton.
In the early 1990s, Fritton Lake attracted some 128,000 day-trippers a year; visitor numbers had fallen dramatically. The enforced closure during Covid offered Somerleyton the chance to do something different. He reopened Fritton as a private club that now has 720 non-cabin-owning members and aspirations for 1,000. He added new eco-cabins, bringing the total up to 110. An additional 1,000 acres of the estate has been rewilded with free roaming pigs, ponies and cattle.
Visitors are, says Somerleyton, “left-leaning, climate aware, ecologically curious” — perfect customers, therefore, for Frittons’ offerings, which include a sauna that floats on the lake, sound baths and a foraging tour, as well as more traditional members’ club activities. Those paying £720 for annual adult membership or buying a cabin (from £150,000 for pre-owned cabins and £350,000 for new) will have access to tennis courts, a cricket ground, heated swimming pool and a “bio gym”, alongside all the nature-based wellness.
Somerleyton was scolded by members when he hosted a supercar event “for being off-brand”. He concedes they were right, but is realistic that making the numbers work solely through wellbeing is a work in progress in terms of local audience. ‘‘The transformation to wellness and wilding just isn’t as complete up here,” he says.
Transitioning an inherited estate — with its deep-seated familial ways — is not always straightforward. But this was not a problem faced by Lara Tabatznik when in 2015 she bought the estate at 42 Acres in Somerset with the intention of creating not just a home but a wellbeing centre. Since her brother, Seth, bought an adjoining 131-acre plot of land shortly after, the ancient woodland, rewilded meadows and a lake have become home to white storks, Scottish wildcats, beavers and otters.
42 Acres has focused on hosting a variety of retreats, such as the three-day August retreat with spiritual guru Satish Kumar. A single ticket costs between £390 and £685.
For independent stays, “soil to gut” menus are largely made from food grown and foraged on the estate; paid-for sessions include yoga, a woodland sauna and wild crafting. The hybrid model should, says 42 Acres’ marketing manager Lisa Hawes, see the enterprise go into profit next year.
The desire to restore nature and connect people and community is universal among those offering these experiences. But unless it is profitable it is not sustainable. The need for substantial initial investment, the fickle nature of tourism, and a general uncertainty of how to value the real-world benefits gained from being in the natural world means turning a profit is a challenge.
At Wasing, wellness offerings are “finally moving into the black after six years”, says Josh Dugdale, but with the estate employing more than 220 people, he adds: “Financially, wellness is not a panacea to the many overheads.”
The same is true of Fritton Lake. While doubling turnover in five years now puts it “in the black”, Somerleyton is clear that the contribution it makes “is not going to pay for [Somerleyton] Hall any time soon”.
Meanwhile, Hanbury-Tenison faces the daunting prospect of refinancing his loan on land that by being restored from sheep-grazed farmland to nature has halved its “useful” value in the eyes of the money men.
Among those leading the way, however, money is not the mission. Most see themselves as guardians or custodians of the land. As Dugdale puts it, “we have an obligation to bring people into connection with these beautiful natural environments that we care for”.
There is a strong argument that these estates do not need to be guided only by giving back. In 2019, the Treasury commissioned the Dasgupta Review, which examined how nature and the services it provides can be given a quantifiable value, from the cost saved by ensuring the health of a river, the clean air provided by a forest or the carbon sequestered by biologically active soil.
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Unlocking the value of these natural services means including them on real-world spreadsheets. How, for example, could nature-based wellness be quantified in reducing the £14bn the NHS spends annually on mental health treatment? How do we calculate the financial benefits of spiritual ones?
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