A New Era

You may have noticed a few things have changed around here. There's a new website. There is new branding. Elmore Court now sits inside the Elmore Estate. And Rewild Things has gone, replaced by Elmore Wild.

So what's going on?

Let's rewind a bit.

When I first opened Elmore as a wedding and events venue, it wasn't because I wanted to do weddings. It was because I'm good at putting on parties, raves and festivals... It's what I'd been doing since I left school — DJing, producing music, promoting clubs and all that. A brilliant time, and rich on almost every level except the one you need to keep a big, rambling old house standing up. My bank balance was not strong enough!

So the only thing I could do was use the house to generate an income. The land and the farm buildings were all tied up in secure tenancies with farming families. The Court itself was the one part of the estate that was actually free. So that was really the only opportunity.

What I love is celebration. Parties. Moments of joy, done properly — extraordinary sound, great music, excellent food, good people — in a place that trod lightly and ran on energy that didn't come out of the ground. So we built the Gillyflower out of earth, put an incredible sound system inside it and opened at the end of 2013.

And then the weddings happened, almost by accident. Couples book eighteen months ahead. By the time anyone came to us wanting a club night or a party or anything else, the diary was full. So weddings it was — and what a thing to end up doing. A day of joy and connection, families and friends in one place, and one of the most important days in people's lives.

Meanwhile, out on the wider estate, things were shifting. Farmland was coming out of tenancy and back into my hands, and with it came the question of what on earth to do with it.

I wrote about what happened next in an earlier journal that you can read here. In 2018 I had something of an epiphany about our place on this earth and why we're here. It wasn't new, exactly — more the hardening of something I'd felt much earlier in my life. But it answered the question as to what this custodianship is actually all about.

It's about connection. To nature, to our own true nature, and to the fact that we are entirely part of that, rather than visitors. That's where the deepest joy comes from.

And here's what struck me. That feeling on a dancefloor, at 2am, with music you adore and people you love — that open-heartedness is the same as the one you feel standing still in a wood, surrounded by birds, when the noise in your head finally stops. Same thing. Different volume.

Creating spaces for joy and connection is what I've always done. So extending that out onto the land felt obvious. We began rewilding and later decided we should build treehouses so people could stay out on the land. They opened in 2023.

I'll be honest about the years in between, because they matter to how we got here.

Unless you ran a business like this one, I don't think you can quite know what the pandemic did to wedding hospitality. It wasn't only the closures. It was so many couples wanting to know what was happening to the most important day of their lives, and us not knowing either. Then, when it lifted, a snowplough of postponed weddings all arriving at once — up to seven a week — at precisely the moment the whole industry discovered many people didn't want to come back to work. Our people were wonderful. There just weren't enough of them, and keeping them from burning out was its own full-time job.

I also chose that moment to build those six treehouses, shortly before the price of timber roughly tripled. I wouldn't undo them for anything but the building of them was always on a knife edge.

And during it all I went through a divorce and lost both my parents.

By the end of it I'd run out of road — physically, mentally and spiritually — and Elmore Court was being held together by other people doing their best. Getting back to myself again took a while. What brought me there was falling in love with it all over again: the land, the history, the food, the joy, and my team.

And from that distance I could finally see it. Elmore wasn't what it had been. It had quietly become something else.

It was more than a wedding venue with some treehouses. It had become a place where people can celebrate the richness of what it means to be human and the beauty and brilliance of the nature that we are all part of.

That feels all the more important now. In a world that seems intent on going mad, it's worth remembering who we are, how we exist on this planet, and how absolutely extraordinary it is to be alive at all. How precious this all is and how important it is for us to remember our place in this place we call home. It is phenomenal. And the intelligence behind it all is Mother Nature.

Elmore is a rare place to be able to say that from. There can't be many spots on earth with this much unbroken family history — the estate was granted to us in 1262, and we've been here ever since. Though when I say ownership, I mean custodianship. Stewardship. More than seven and a half centuries of looking after this land. You can feel it when you're here. You can't buy that.

The land sits in a bend of the River Severn. It's ancient, and it has the potential to be absolutely full of life. We're returning it to that: meddling as little as we can, supporting as much as we can.

This winter we start construction of a 7000 meter fence round the entire 450 acres of rewilding land which will be finished in February. Beavers then arrive in the spring. After that, wild pigs and wild ponies will join a landscape that already holds so much, including our herd of longhorn cattle, who have been a revelation.

As in any wild place, a growing population of herbivores needs some predation. We've been acting as that. The result is about the best free-range, pasture-fed, chemical-free beef you can get. So we farm carefully: the cattle rotate on and off the rewilding land, out on it when the flora is flourishing, off it in the cold or the very dry.

So that's Elmore Estate. Think of it as a village of different parts.

Elmore Court is our place of celebration. Weddings, parties, events, photoshoots, retreats, gatherings — joy rooted in history, and built for the future.

Elmore Wild is the other half of the same idea. Six treehouses looking out over our wetlands, in woodland thick with birdsong. Wild swimming, a sauna, nature walks. Somewhere to disconnect in order to reconnect, and to remember what it is to be wild.

And there's a third thing rising, which we're calling Elmore Rise. It takes that remembering a step further, into the healing you can find there. More on that soon.

In the meantime, we're open. Open for your celebrations, your love, your very good health.

Let's make this place a different story — one full of biodiversity, of colour, of creativity, of joy.

And a whole load of totally awesome parties and gatherings and fabulous unions !

With all my love

Anselm xx