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The
Nanhoron Estate today covers some 2,024 hectares
(5,000 acres) on the
Llŷn
Peninsula
covering every kind of landscape from mountain top
to coastline, river valley and woodland.
Its extent is almost exactly as it was in the
Eighteenth Century.
The Estate has grown and developed over
centuries and successive generations of the family
have always been at the cutting edge of farming,
whether planting thousands of trees in the
Eighteenth Century or introducing the latest farming
methods in the early Nineteenth Century -
“the great improvements introduced
into
this part of the country within the last thirty
years” (A
Description of Caernarvonshire 1809-1811)
- and doing the same in the 1950s and 1990s as the
Estate was passed down to the next generation.
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In
the Twenty-First Century the Home Farm of some 500
hectares (1,200 acres), run by Nanhoron Farms Ltd,
has begun to move away from intensive dairy farming,
once the mainstay of the Estate, to establishing a
commercial beef enterprise, mainly grass-fed, and
with some crops grown for forage.
The whole of the Home Farm is now part of Tir
Gofal, an agri-environment scheme that promotes
whole farm conservation.
Tir Gofal means ‘Land Care’, and
aims to protect the archaeological heritage and the
natural environment in one scheme.
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Under
Tir Gofal all our headlands have a meter-wide strip
between the crop and field boundary and there is
widespread use of the farm set-aside to provide
cover for seed-eating birds and game birds.
A great number of birds, some of them rare
and threatened species, can be seen about the
Estate, including ravens, herons, woodpeckers,
&c. From Winter through to the following Autumn,
the Estate offers wonderful views: heather-clad
moorland; ancient woodland; woods and banks covered
in bluebells; river banks full of marsh marigolds in
the Spring; the red and gold of Autumn colours.
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Some
of the woods have large pure stands of Sessile Oaks,
while the two tiny islands off the end of the Llŷn
Peninsula, to the south of Aberdaron Bay, Ynys
Gwylan Fawr and Ynys Gwylan Bach (Large and Small
Gull Island) are host to the largest breeding
population of puffins in North Wales and are a
European Site of Special Scientific Interest.
The isolated position of the islands allows
the puffins to thrive.
(Puffin picture
courtesy of
Llyn marine charters) |
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Family
records describe the members of the different
generations down the years as ‘enjoying’ the
Estate. This
feeling is certainly true of this generation and, we
hope, will continue into the next.
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Bettina Harden
Nanhoron
Pwllheli
Gwynedd
LL53 8DL
Tel: 01758 730 610 |
