People, Land & 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.

The multiple values of our landholdings

As a landowning organisation and charitable trust, we cover a lot of ground.

This unique breadth to our identity means that we must consider the multiple values of our landholdings – their economic, educational, cultural, social and environmental worth. Taking this carefully balanced view ensures that we make well-informed decisions around land-use, supporting a wide range of activities. Collectively, these provide vital sources of income to help sustain our Outdoor Learning and grant-giving activities.

Living communities

Our rural landholdings are living communities, homes to progressive 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 9,000 hectares of land in Buckinghamshire, Cumbria, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire and Oxfordshire, we also work with partner estates in Cumbria, Lancashire and Derbyshire and host organisations across the UK.

Looking ahead

Active estate management dictates that we are constantly looking for new opportunities and ways to evolve and improve our income streams 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 consistently striving 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.