Where can you stay in Britain's temperate rainforest?
Two places where you can truly immerse yourself in days of Atlantic rainforest exploration without sacrificing comfort and style are Garth Gell Farmhouse and Borradill cabins.
Garth Gell Farmhouse on the edge of Snowdonia National Park (sleeps 6)
Borradill looks out over Loch Sunart on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands, in one of the last real strongholds of Atlantic oakwood rainforest. Garth Gell Farmhouse sits in a hidden valley in Snowdonia National Park, North Wales, held between two protected pockets of the same rare habitat.
The Cottage at Borradill (sleeps 2-4)
Temperate rainforest is not a marketing phrase. It is a specific, named ecosystem, dependent on high rainfall, (over 200cm of precipitation a year), mild year-round temperatures, clean air, and undisturbed land for over 400 years. Bubbling with life: mosses, rare ferns, liverworts and fungi; temperate rainforests cover less than 1% of the planet's land surface. Rarer than tropical rainforests yet they receive a fraction of the attention.
Sesile Oak tree at Borradill
Britain holds onto a handful of true fragments. These fragile pockets exist down the west coast of Scotland, Wales, into Cornwall further south, and they are shrinking. Scotland's entire remaining rainforest zone comes to roughly 30,000 hectares, an area you could fit inside Edinburgh.
Grazing cows at Garth Gell, Wales
Garth Gell Farmhouse, North Wales
Nestled in the spectacular Mawddach valley in the foothills of Cadair Idris. The farmhouse is inside Snowdonia National Park and under a Dark Sky Reserve. It is held between two of the area's protected woodlands: one a LIFE Celtic Rainforests project, the other, an RSPB ancient woodland and heather nature reserve. This 220 year old, off-grid stone farmhouse, sleeps six across four bedrooms and is set in 25 acres of ancient woodland and pasture land. An Aga and wood-burning stoves do the heating. The water comes straight from the hillside stream. There is no wifi, no television, and the nearest town, Barmouth, is twenty minutes down the road. Here on a clear night, just as you think your day full of adventures are over, the sky becomes alive with layer upon layer of twinkling stars, constellations and shooting stars streaking past.
Cosy corner at Garth Gell Farmhouse
Kathleen and Lewis, whose family have owned the property for over 40 years, believe in the simple conviction that by experiencing nature in its full glory, fully immersed and intentionally off grid, these startlingly beautiful places, can-not fail to enchant, intrigue and delight; and once guests are touched by the wonders of these rare woodlands they too will care and value them - possibly enough to want to help protect and restore them.
The kitchen at Garth Gell farmhouse
Borradill, Scottish Highlands
Twenty-five acres surround Borradill on the shore of Loch Sunart, and part of that acreage is already old rainforest: oak, birch and hazel thick with the lichens and mosses that only grow where the air stays this clean and this damp. Two cabins, the House and the Cottage, can be booked separately or together, and both open straight onto the woodland. Designed for the adventures you can have here - foraging baskets, a kitchen for cooking, a deck to dry wetsuits, pine clad rooms with the feel of both Hebrides and Scandinavia, where the cabins originally came from.
The foraging kitchen at Borradill House
The rest of the land is mid-restoration. Much of it was planted for commercial forestry in the early twentieth century, and the project here is patient: take the spruce and the Larch out, and the woodland finds its own way back. Flowers first, then birch, then oak and hazel behind them. The plan is for the full twenty-five acres to return, eventually, to the mixed Atlantic forest it was before any of that started. To the west, an RSPB ancient oakwood. Across the water, the Isle of Carna and Glen Gripsdale on Morvern. Protected neighbours, all of them, holding the same fragile line.
Dining area in the Cottage at Borradill
Two ends of the same rare thing
Both properties are privately run holiday stays, doorways into landscapes of other worldly beauty. Both are curated by designers with a sharp visual aesthetic and designed and furnished with style, quality and craft. Both owners have shared interest in supporting ecological awareness, research, restoration and protection. Where they differ is useful, not just geographic.
Borradill is Scandi-Hebridean in its design: built for two households wanting comfort and quiet alongside the wild.
Garth Gell works from the opposite instinct, sensitively restored original features such as oak beams, slate floors, limewashed walls; it offers quiet considered comfort and lived in much as this valley has been lived in for centuries: off-grid, with water provided by the stream and evenings by candle and fire.
Both offer an off-grid luxury of a different kind.
Borradill and Garth Gell are building a partnership, and hope to grow it into something larger: an alliance of places designed and run to bring people close enough to fall in love with these ancient rainforests. It is an approach to conservation that puts people's love for these places at the centre of protecting them. As Sir David Attenborough said:
“No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.”
