Derbyshire: 10 Fun facts - How many do you know?

When our guests arrive, they often ask us about our fabulous county of Derbyshire so we thought we’d find some fun facts to share with you. How many of these do you already know?

1. Derbyshire covers an area of 255,071 hectares (630,366 acres) - which means it makes up around nearly two per cent of England!
2. The Peak District National Park is a... 555 square mile area (1,438 square kms) of outstanding natural beauty. It was the first national park in the United Kingdom to receive recognition in 1951.
3. More than 763,000 people live in Derbyshire with around 40,000 people living in the Peak District National Park.
4. The Peak District National Park accounts for more than a third of Derbyshire's total land area and stretches beyond Derbyshire into Cheshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.
5. If you’re a cyclist, you won’t have to look far to find some super cycle routes. The Peak District is packed full of them and even Derby, Derbyshire’s main city, has more than 100kms of on and off road cycle routes – imagine how many cycle routes we’ve got in the whole county!
6. More than 8.4 million people live within 30 kms of Derbyshire’s county lines and more than 80% of the UK’s population live within a four hour drive of the Peak District – so what’s stopping you paying us a visit?
7. As a country Derbyshire is great at green! We currently compost and recycle 43.3 per cent of the county's rubbish that’s up from 18 per cent in 2003/2004.
8. The Peak District National Park receives more than 10 million visitors each year – but luckily our visitors don’t come all at once!
9. Derbyshire is home to the renowned JB Kind which has been a timber specialist for more than 140 years and has been selling some of the UK’s most innovative wooden doors for more than 30 years! In fact JB Kind’s doors have just been featured in the Channel 4 Fisherman’s Church episode of Restoration Man!
10. We’re wizards with water in Derbyshire. From the ‘cracking’ Castleton Water and Cromford Canal to the Erewash Canal and the Trent and Mersey Canal – our water’s wonderful in Derbyshire so why not explore our county by narrowboat, windsurfing or canoe?

Going for Green!

As farmers we are acutely aware of the environment and all things eco but we’d never really thought of ourselves as particularly ‘green’. However all this changed when we were asked to write our environment and sustainability policy and we started to take a proper look at everything eco we did – and were amazed!

Of course we’d made sure that we have renewable energies powering our luxury lodges with a mix of air source heat pumps and solar panels that supply heating and electricity, to the sustainable logs we provide for the log burning fires. We provide recycling facilities, collect rainwater, provide environmentally-conscious cleaning products and use local suppliers – but doesn’t everyone? Our feedback and research tells us, apparently not!

I suspect as farmers we’re always looking to encourage biodiversity and support the natural environment because it’s part of the way we live, it always has been, but so many people were surprised to hear that since we’d started work on the lodges in 2009 we’ve planted 600 metres of hedgerows, as well as 250 trees. Guests have been happy to hear that we designed the large pond that sits outside the lodges to make sure that we encouraged all of nature’s wonderful creatures and in support of their habitats and that we consider how to heal the land on which we work.

To start with we thought that writing down our environment and sustainability policy was just a bit of admin that we didn’t really have time for, but part way through listing all the things we did, we felt proud that we were doing so much, when many others appear to struggle to do even the simplest of positive ‘green’ tasks.

So thanks to everyone for their warm support of our new policy. If you’ve not read it yet, you can find it on our website at http://www.oaklandscountrylodges.co.uk/sustainability-environmental-policy.pdf

If you’ve got any ideas about anything more we can do, we’d be delighted to hear from you.