Treading lightly: how we think about sustainability at Brook Cottage

The wildlife lake at Brook Cottage

There's a version of "sustainable glamping" that's mostly about messaging - a recycling bin in the corner, a bar of soap with kraft paper packaging, a laminated notice asking you to turn off the lights. We've never been particularly interested in that version.

What we're more interested in is the slower, less photogenic work: the decisions that don't make it onto Instagram, the things we've said no to, and the compromises we make every day between running a business that people love to stay in and being genuinely careful with the land we've been entrusted with.

This is an attempt to share some of that, honestly. It's also a work in progress — and we think that's probably how it should be.

The wildlife lake

The wildlife lake at Brook Cottage is, to put it plainly, not for swimming or fishing. Guests are welcome to sit by the water - there's a jetty that catches the evening light beautifully - but the lake itself is left entirely to its residents: trout, water voles, toads, mallards and moorhens, and the visiting heron and kingfisher that stop us in our tracks every time.

It also looks, at certain times of year, a bit weedy. That's intentional. Commercially available aquatic herbicides would give us a cleaner, more manicured stretch of water, but they'd also disrupt the ecosystem we're working to protect. So we leave well alone, and the wildlife rewards us for it.

The ground rules on weedkiller

Glyphosate-based weedkillers are a hard no for us. We don't use them anywhere on the site, and we never will.

That means a significant amount of hand-weeding, which is time-consuming and unglamorous and entirely worth it. It also means we've made peace with certain plants growing semi-wild in areas guests might not immediately recognise as intentional. Nettles, meadowsweet, bramble - these aren't oversights, they're habitats. Pollinators, particularly bees and butterflies, depend on them, and we'd rather have a thriving insect population than a site that looks pristine from every angle.

The manicured parts of Brook Cottage are manicured because we care about your experience. The wild parts are wild because we care about everything else that lives here.

Buying local, buying thoughtfully

When we put together welcome packs, breakfast hampers and afternoon tea hampers for guests, we think carefully about where things come from. We work with local suppliers wherever we can - people who know the peninsula, who make things by hand, who we can have a real conversation with about what goes into their products.

Our goats' milk soap is made by Charlotte who lives a little further down the Llŷn, from milk produced by her own goats. It costs more than a bulk-order alternative. It also means something, and we think you can tell the difference.

The coffee in your hut is roasted in Nefyn, just down the road. We could source something cheaper from a national supplier. We'd rather not.

The bacon and sausages come from our local butcher, whose father started the business in 1948. You can walk in and find photographs documenting the family's history on the walls - that kind of continuity matters to us, and it's the kind of business we want to support.

We pay attention to packaging too - not obsessively, but consistently. Less plastic where there's a sensible alternative. Less waste overall.

Growing our own

We grow a lot of our own fruit, vegetables and herbs. It's something we're building up gradually and are continuing to develop as we work toward a more self-sufficient way of living on this land. Our chickens produce the eggs that go into your hampers. Later this year, we're hoping to introduce bees - partly for the honey, but mostly because having a healthy hive on the land matters to us ecologically.

None of this is about performance. It's just how we want to live, and the business and the smallholding have become genuinely intertwined.

Water

Our water comes from our own well. When the water comes from your own land, you think about it differently, and we're conscious of how we use it: no running taps, no long showers by default, a general awareness that water isn't simply infrastructure.

We don't lecture guests about this, but if a few days here changes how you think about turning on a tap, that feels like a good outcome.

Waste

We ask guests to rinse recyclables and put them in the recycling bin - no sorting required, we handle that ourselves. Our own food waste goes into a compost system which then helps us build healthy soil. These are small things, but consistency across a full season adds up.

If you're staying with us and you're not sure whether something is recyclable, leave it in the recycling bin and we'll figure it out. The worst outcome is that it doesn't get recycled. The better outcome, usually, is that it does.

What this actually looks like

Sustainability at Brook Cottage isn't a checklist or a certification. It's a series of daily decisions - some of them inconvenient, some of them expensive, some of them invisible to guests - made because we believe that looking after this small corner of the Llŷn Peninsula is part of what we're here to do.

The huts are beautiful because we want you to have a genuinely luxurious experience. The land around them is managed the way it is because we believe that matters too. Those two things don't have to be in conflict, and mostly, they aren't.

When you book a stay at Brook Cottage Shepherd Huts, you're supporting a small, independent business that takes its responsibilities to this place seriously. We don't do things lightly here - and we think that's exactly what a luxury shepherd hut holiday in North Wales should feel like. If sustainability and staying somewhere with real values are part of how you make choices, we'd like to think Brook Cottage is exactly the kind of place you've been looking for.

Come and see for yourself.

Book your stay at Brook Cottage