The Nanhoron Estate covers some 2,024 hectares (5,000 acres) on the Llŷn Peninsula including 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.
In the twenty-first Century the Home Farm of some 600 hectares (1,500 acres), run by Nanhoron Farms Ltd, moved away from intensive dairy farming, once the mainstay of the Estate, establishing a pedigree Hereford herd, now added to with a herd of Salers (a beautiful mahogany-red breed of French cattle) as a commercial beef enterprise, grass-fed, and with some crops grown for forage. The whole of the Home Farm participates in Glastir, Rural Development Programme for Wales.
The Estate
All the livestock fodder on the farm is home grown, along with the silage used. We use minimu fertilisation in our fodder/silage growth, one of the many things we do reduce our carbon footrprint.
A great number of birds, some of them rare and threatened species can be seen about the Estate, including ravens, herons, woodpeckers, peregrine falcons, kestrels, choughs on the coast, with occasional visits from waxwings. 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.
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)
