Eco-glamping

There is nothing like a heat wave and a long dry spell to really make you start to think about the impact you’re having on the environment. Asides from all the horror stories in the news about global warming, when you live in a rural, and usually very green and lush part of the world, you can’t help but notice the grass turn from green to yellow to brown before your very eyes. Here at The Forge, this is something we are really passionate about and we’ve designed our guest experience to try to really minimise our impact on the planet. Here are just some of the eco-friendly things you can expect when you stay with us:

1. WATER – in each of our camp kitchens we have running water which we collect using recycled plastic barrels (that in a former life carried chutney from the Far East apparently!). We use all of the grey water from your washing up to water our newly planted trees that are growing around the site. And we collect all of the rain water from the roof of the shower block to water our polytunnel so we never have to connect a hosepipe to mains water. Plus, our composting toilets don’t use any water all, saving around 8 litres per visit, and up to about 50 litres of water per day per person. And the worms totally love it!

2. SOLAR ENERGY – we don’t have any electricity on site at all. Everything is powered by solar energy from the lights in the kitchens, composting toilets and showers to the portable phone chargers in each tent. Sadly, this means no hairdryers or TV but we find that most people can deal without these, and in fact leave wondering what they were ever worried about!

3. CARBON NEUTRAL – although we do provide gas hobs in each of our kitchens, we do encourage our guests to cook outdoors on their own individual campfires using logs we’ve harvested from our own woodland or from our friends’ woodland locally. As we plant a tree for every one we cut down this makes it a completely sustainable and carbon neutral way of cooking. It doesn’t take much wood to get the fire going nicely to fry up some bacon and toast a few marshmallows. Plus, it’s a lot more fun than an electric cooker!

4. MINIMAL PLASTICS – as much as possible we try to be a plastic-free site, meaning that we encourage people to drink our lovely Welsh water from the tap, rather than bringing in bottled water and encourage people to use our wheelbarrows rather than plastic carrier bags to carry things around. We provide all of our tea and coffee in glass Kilner jars and we buy in bulk to replenish these to minimise packaging. We also provide all of the campfire cooking equipment so you don’t have to bring in your own instant barbecues. And if you order one of our welcome hampers, you’ll get all your eggs, fruit and veg ‘au naturel’, straight from the garden and into the basket as nature intended, with no need for any additional packaging at all!

5. LOW FOOD MILES – which brings me on to my final point…. One of the big reasons for us setting up The Forge in the first place was so that we could attempt to be partially self-sufficient. We still have a LONG way to go, but we do have plenty of our own eggs and handmade sausages which we sell to our guests. We also have lots of seasonal fruit and veg, plus our hedgerows and hill fort are a veritable bounty of wild food at different times of year. We’ve yet to try it properly, but we reckon we could live quite happily for a week or two only eating food from our own 20 acres. If anyone else is game, we’d welcome our guests to join us in this challenge too!