Our Estate is located on a beautiful, historic estate near Sevenoaks in West Kent, England.

Over the period 1997 to early 2019, we were dedicated to producing the highest quality British milk ensuring at the same time the best possible safety and welfare of our staff, livestock and the environment.  Sadly, while we operated to the highest level of integrity and transparency, worked within every regulation and rule thrown at us and had an outstanding closed herd of holstein friesans, we could not make the economics work.  Over 20 years we invested a considerable sum of money on building new infrastructure and covering operating losses.  In 2018, we were milking some 240 cows three times a day.  We won Gold Awards.  In the event, none of this was enough.  The level of the milk price did not justify continued investment.  So, in  2019 we sold our herd.  We left the industry with pride even if our wallet had been dented, but we also left with sorrow; sorrow that the supermarkets and the consumers are, when all is said and done, unwilling to support high quality, safe dairy farming.

Today, we have split the business into five units:

1). we let our grazing land out to other farmers, mostly sheep but in the dryer months also some cattle;

2). we continue to have our arable operations, but because we now do not need the crops for our livestock we are selling them to market or to other farmers;

3). we will improve still further the wildlife habitats on our land, in the woods, the rough areas and around the reservoirs and ponds;

4). we have two houses available for rent through Airbnb:  Puncheur Place and the Oast House.  The Covid restrictions have not helped, but all of the ratings we have received so far from guests have been stellar and we are seeing guests return;  

5). to wrap up our activities at Henden, after we ceased housing livestock on the farm we spent all of 2021 redeveloping our barns so that they could be used for secure storage. We are presently working exclusively with one client, who uses the barns to store a range of assets. The nature of this particular type of storage is that traffic into and out of the estate is sporadic and over the year low in average volume – perhaps some 40% of the traffic that he had when we had our dairy farm.

We enter 2022 and beyond with hope and enthusiasm.  We are proud of and enjoy our Estate.  If you visit it through Airbnb or are simply by passing through on the footpaths or bridelways we hope you will enjoy it, too.

Thank you for stopping by this website.  We hope you will find it informative and enjoyable. If you have any comments or questions please do not hesitate to write to info@hendenmanor.com.  

Thank you,

Roni & Martin Lovegrove