Land, Farming & Property

Building on our founder’s love of the countryside, The Ernest Cook Trust is committed to the progressive stewardship of our landholdings, ensuring that all activities support our vision for an environmentally engaged society with stronger connections to nature.

Funding access to nature

All our landholdings have a dual responsibility: to preserve and enhance the land and environment, and to ensure the underlying business thrives for the benefit of our tenants, estate communities and beneficiaries – providing access to nature for children, young people, their families and communities.

Our extensive landholdings, spanning 9,000 hectares across six counties, are vital sources of income that help to sustain our charitable Outdoor Learning activities and programmes.

Living communities

The communities that comprise our rural landholdings are home to tenanted farm businesses, residential tenants and small enterprises, while also serving as unique open-air classrooms for our Outdoor Learning programmes.

Together with our own land in Buckinghamshire, Cumbria, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire and Oxfordshire, we also work with partner estates in Cumbria, Lancashire and Derbyshire.

Looking ahead

Active estate management dictates that we are constantly looking for new opportunities and ways to evolve and improve our income stream in support of the Trust’s overall charitable object of education.

While looking at the overall context of our estates, we also recognise that each area of land is unique, and so is evaluated based on its own attributes, while we consistently strive to work in harmony with the natural environment.

We aspire to effect change, using our unique position to help shape the national debate around land in this unprecedented era.