Treading Lightly

We are lucky to have such a beautiful workplace at Tuddenham Mill. How many people have a wild 12-acre meadow or a pond with a river running into it on their doorstep? It’s a real Suffolk oasis!

The Meadow is a unique feature of the hotel, and one our guests love. The July rain has made it particularly vigorous this summer, with tall grasses and hogweed wafting above clover, ribwort plantain, yarrow, and oxeye daisies. Butterflies and pollinators lift in clouds, and in the evening you can hear muntjac barking, sometimes a shy fox too. If you’re lucky, you can glimpse kingfishers darting along the river, and you’ll often hear woodpeckers tapping at the willows on the water’s edge. And everyone loves it in the spring when our resident swans guide their new brood on their first millpond paddles.

It’s an unspoilt expanse of nature, and we want to do everything possible to minimise our impact on it. There’s been a watermill at Tuddenham since at least 1086 – there’s a record of it the Domesday Book – and while it’s obviously evolved over the centuries, it now falls to us to look after this very special corner of Suffolk.

We are collaborating with sustainability advisors, 3Keel, to help us do just that. They’re a brilliant company, experts in measuring the environmental impact of business operations from hotels to supermarkets, and university colleges to charities, and advising on best practice. They’ll be working with us to audit the products we buy, the waste we create, and the emissions we produce across every aspect of running a hotel and restaurant – and they'll be helping us do better.

We’ll keep you posted. We’re excited to get going on this process, and I think our swans, kingfishers, foxes and all our Meadow flora and fauna will approve too.

It’s a long journey, but an exciting one.

Lee