About Us
Joined-Up Holidays is a project born of a desire to connect people with animals, nature and the natural environment regardless of anyone's special needs or disabilities. By offering farm visits with activities individually tailored to the needs and wishes of each guest, we hope to offer everyone their own unique, fun and informative experience.
The therapeutic benefits of sharing our lives with animals is well documented and gaining increasing prominence as are the many benefits of the outdoor lifestyle, understanding the food chain and growing our own food.
Starting with an old cow byre, assorted derelict outbuildings and 7 acres of muddy land we set out to build an eco-friendly visitor centre for day visits and short breaks. All the building work at Joined-Up Holidays has been done with the environment in mind so we do not use any toxic or poisonous materials and are very careful about where things like timber have come from. We only use materials that are sustainable i.e. if trees are chopped down for timber beams they are replaced by more trees. The stone work on the house nearly all came from disused dry stone walls on the farm apart from the corner pieces which came from a local quarry. The bathrooms all have water savings gadgets as our water is metered and we pay for it according to how much we use. We save water in rain water barrels for the animals, garden and polytunnel. There is a lot of extra insulation in the building and double glazing so that it is easy to keep warm and cosy. We use eco-friendly paints and woodstains and compost all our animal and plant waste to put back on the land so that we do not need chemical fertilisers. We recycle as many items as possible rather than throwing them away – some old car tyres have recently been made into pots for growing potatoes for example.
At Joined-Up Holidays we like to demonstrate that it is possible to be as environmentally friendly without giving up any of our usual comforts or convenience. We have installed a wind turbine to generate our electricity and any surplus is fed into the National Grid for use by others. We have also installed a ground source heat pump which provides all our heating and hot water without burning any fuel at all by extracting the heat from the ground outside and pumping it around the underfloor heating pipes in the house. The heat pump uses electricity to circulate the heat but for every unit of power it uses it generates 5 units of heat so it is a very efficient and economical way to heat a building. It is known that fossil fuels such as coal and gas contribute to global warming because they put too much carbon into the atmosphere and disturb our weather patterns, so where possible it is better to reduce or remove their use.
With a little thought and effort it is easy to help the world around us rather than poison it with chemicals and toxins and we see the benefit in increased wildlife around the farm every day.