About The Harewood Estate
Nestled between Leeds and Harrogate, on the border between West and North Yorkshire, lies the Harewood Estate. Stretching from the edge of Leeds in the South to the River Wharfe in the North it covers a sweeping landscape designed by Lancelot “Capability” Brown and has been home to the Lascelles family since 1738. Find out more about Harewood’s history here.
The Estate spans some 4000 acres, much of which can be seen from Harewood House, and includes around 100 listed features, including two scheduled monuments, as well as areas of ancient woodland, wood pasture parkland and arable. The Estate has a nationally recognised conservation programme with particular emphasis on the restoration of historic buildings; the protection and management of diverse habitats; and the maintenance of the Grade I Listed Park designed by Capability Brown.
In recent years it’s changed from being a traditionally run estate to one much more outwards facing as a leisure and lifestyle destination. It has become increasingly diverse, and its operations and offerings now include commercial units, residential properties, holiday cottages, filming, arable and livestock farming, forestry, renewable energy generation, food production, health and wellbeing, outdoor education and hospitality.
WHAT WE DO
FARM SHOP
Visit our newly refitted farm shop in the heart of the Estate at Harewood Yard. Here you’ll find our Estate reared meats and ready meals as well as a variety of other locally sourced food produce alongside beautiful collectables and soft furnishings from local designers and the crafty members of the Estate team.
Pay us a visit and pick up fresh sourdough bread, local eggs, a bottle of Harewood Greystone Gin or Nytimber sparkling wine, Harewood Honey, bespoke fragrances designed by Chapter Organics, Lottie Shaw cakes and bakes, luxury candles from Meadow Farm and locally commissioned artwork from Folded Forest. We also put together seasonal hampers you can put your name down for. So pop in for a coffee, soft drink or ice cream and have a browse!
LIVESTOCK
As you explore Harewood you’ll no doubt see our range of rare and native breed livestock. Look out for our hardy Hebridean Black Sheep, shaggy Highland Cows, beefy pedigree Aberdeen Angus, our majestic Red and Fallow Deer and the newest additions to the Harewood family, Wensleydale Sheep and Oxford Sandy & Black Pigs. Our animals help to manage the historic landscape and enjoy wild foraged food sources for as much of the year as possible. We’ve implemented conservation grazing regimes on the Estates parklands and grasslands to produce high quality healthy, ethical and sustainable pasture fed meat.
You can find a range of our products in the Estate Farm Shop or enjoy them when dining with the Harewood Food & Drink Project.
ARABLE
Our arable operation balances commercial crop production with environmentally friendly farming approaches that mean we can deliver both great food and positive outcomes for wildlife and ecosystem services. Crops grown today using regenerative and precision farming techniques include wheat, barley, oil seed rape and maize. We’ve improved over 25 miles of farmland hedgerows in recent years and sown flower rich buffer strips around most of our arable field margins to make space for wildlife, protect soils and store water. This has helped a variety of threatened species increase in number but it’s also good for food and farming as it means our inputs of harmful pesticides and fertilisers are greatly reduced.
FILMING
Records of film and television production at Harewood go back as far as 1956. We are proud to work alongside Screen Yorkshire in promoting Yorkshire as a filming destination.
Over the years the combination of privacy and the variety of settings Harewood is able to offer have encouraged numerous productions. The most prominent being Emmerdale, who have been based here since the 1990s. Other well-known series filmed at Harewood in the past include Victoria, Gentleman Jack, Heartbeat, A Touch of Frost, and At Home with the Braithwaites to name a few. Feature films have included Downton Abbey, The Beast Within and Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose. We’ve also welcomed Land Rover and others for TV commercials.
FORESTRY
The Estate has over 800 acres of woodland, including many scheduled ancient woodland sites. In our parklands the mighty oak predominates. Elsewhere it’s a mix of soft and hard woods with some amazing specimens of beech, chestnut, lime and cedar. We manage our woodlands to improve their amenity value and to provide fuel for our renewable energy efforts. Very few areas are treated as commercial forestry and we work to protect and enhance the areas around our many veteran and ancient trees, key havens for wildlife.
We’re creating lots of new wooded areas and have planted over 40,000 native trees to create new areas of wildlife rich scrub, shelter belt, riparian woodland next to water courses and bring on the next generation of parkland trees. The parkland trees are all located in areas shown on historic maps of the estate that were used to help create and frame the views that Capability Brown intended.
GREEN ENERGY
We’re doing our bit for sustainability and attempting to minimise the impacts of climate change and reduce our carbon footprint. Much progress has been made to decarbonise and make Harewood more sustainable. As well as switching most machinery and equipment to electric, renewable energy schemes include solar and biomass. Biomass plants are powered by wood chip taken from selective thinning and management of the Estate’s woodlands, which is needed to protect the many ancient and veteran trees and deliver further benefits to wildlife. Biomass provides heat to all the Estate’s commercial office spaces, residential properties and holiday cottages. It even heats Harewood House and the Courtyard, saving more than 500 tonnes of CO2 per year. To put that into context, that’s the equivalent of a car driving more than 1.2 million miles or the burning of 540,000 pounds of coal.
WILDLIFE
Who knew that such a wealth of wildlife can be found just a few miles from the centre of a major city? Harewood is managed and conserved to protect and enhance the landscape for wildlife and biodiversity. Important habitats at Harewood include waterways and wetlands, woodlands, wood pasture and farmland, which are all refuge and home to many declining plants, birds, bees and butterflies. At least 24 species of mammal have been recorded on the Estate, as well as over 160 species of birds of which at least 80 are known to breed. We’re a nationally important site for unusual Waxcaps and Earth tongue mushrooms. We’ve recorded over 18 species of butterfly too!
CONSERVATION
An in-tune environment is good for everyone. Sometimes the balance gets unfairly swayed and a species needs our help to find its feet again. Conservation efforts can give species this helping hand. Our sympathetic farming and forestry work has helped many Biodiversity Action Plan Species increase and recover. Over the years we have implemented a number of special conservation projects to help different species and habitats. This has seen us welcome back Barn Owl and Otter to the Estate after many years of absence. Harewood recently started a major 10-year landscape restoration and regeneration project (probably the biggest intervention since Brown’s time). The project will restore damaged and degraded historic structures, ecosystems and natural processes, create new habitats, encourage greater biodiversity and enhance natural capital functions such as water storage and carbon capture.
RED KITES
Red Kites were reintroduced at Harewood as part of a national project run in partnership with RSPB, Yorkshire Water and English Nature (now Natural England). 80 kites were released at Harewood between 1999-2001 and birds settled in immediately with some, unusually, breeding here in their first year. Birds have since gone on to spread across much of Yorkshire. We discourage feeding of kites, but they can be readily seen from all the Public Rights of Way across the Estate at any time of year. On winter evenings over 100 birds can be seen in the skies as they gather before joining communal roosts. Each year we rehabilitate numerous birds that have been injured through accidents or persecution – sadly shooting and poisoning are still issues these birds face in the region today.